Fixing a $6,600 Problem for $300

Overview

My car was bouncing and feeling like it was losing control at slow speeds. The dealer wanted $6,600 to replace shocks, brakes, tires, control arms, and fix an oil leak. Instead of blindly paying, I investigated myself and found the real problem: a single tire with a massive bulge. Total repair cost? $300 for a new tire and mount. This is why you should always get a second opinion and understand what’s actually wrong with your car before authorizing expensive repairs.

Key Moments

• Dealer quote: $6,600 for shocks, brakes, tires, suspension, and oil gasket
• Using a GoPro to inspect front suspension components
• Testing shocks by leveraging up on the tire
• Discovering the bulging tire by feeling with hands
• The bulge causing the bump every tire rotation
• Final repair cost: $200-300 vs $6,600 quoted

Full Transcript (Edited)

Hey everybody, so I wanted to do a little quick video to share with you why you should be very careful with mechanics out there. They can be very dishonest, and especially here in California with the cost of retail space being so expensive and labor being so expensive, they will put things on your bill that are extremely high.

I just got quoted six thousand six hundred dollars to fix a wobble on a car. So basically the car is going down the street and it’s kind of jumping every once in a while and you feel like you’re losing control. And they want $6,600 to replace the shocks and the brakes and the tires and some suspension pieces, control arms, and an oil gasket leak, and so many things.

And I found that what the problem is, and I’m going to share with you why you should think twice.

The Investigation

Okay, so here’s the car. And like I said, they wanted to charge six thousand six hundred dollars to fix a car. It kind of bounces at slow speeds and it just has gotten worse over time.

I’ll show you what I found. So I took these wheels off in the front here and I even used a GoPro. Let me show you, that’s still kind of mounted down here over here. I used the GoPro to see that in the front there was nothing wrong. There was nothing wrong going on in there. The parts that they told me that were defective, they seem to be behaving just fine.

So I’m gonna go to the back wheel which I have up here. And after going down the street and kind of feeling the car, I realized that, I was like no, this feels like there’s a tire, a tire. And just using my senses, I found out where the issue was.

Here we are in the back. And if you look at this tire, I was using this right here to see, testing the shocks. And you can, if you leverage up like that, you can see that the shock is behaving normally. So the shocks are not the problem here.

The Real Problem

But I felt like okay, there has to be a bump on one of these tires. Because when you go down the street very slowly, I felt a bump even when I’m not going over a speed bump. If you were going over a speed bump and the car keeps on jumping or bouncing, then that’s the shock. But if you’re going slow, like five miles per hour, and every once in a while you feel like bloop, bloop, bloop, that’s a tire.

And check this out. I put my hands on the other tires and they’re all fine. But this one right here, this one has a big bulge. So yeah, look, I’m gonna put my hand on it like this, and if you can see that there’s an indentation like that, and over here it becomes flat. The tire here is flat, but on this side you see there’s this bulge. And that’s what’s causing the bump every time that the tire rotates. See, the bulge is gone, but over here there’s like a shape like that. It goes like this and then it goes bloop, bump.

And so that is probably, that has to be the issue because that bump right there, that one right there, that’s not supposed to be there. And this is an old tire, which you can tell by looking at the rubber. You can see here there’s cracking.

The Real Cost

And the cost of replacing just this one tire to fix this problem is going to be $200 for the tire plus about $30 or $40 bucks to have it mounted. And that means that the repair bill is going to drop from $6,600 all the way down to $300.

So I think that’s a pretty good saving, right? So it pays to know about cars. So if you’re ever presented with a large bill for your car, reach out to me because I can usually tell you what’s going on and save you a ton of money. They will gouge you. Mechanics will literally try to take every single penny that you have if you’re not careful.

All right, so hopefully that was helpful.