pegkerr | Useful site for pricing car repairs (Reply)

Found this on Twitter. Original link is here:

David Sturtz has created a car tool that you use on car repairmen. It's the kind of a wrench you throw into the plans of any unscrupulous mechanic who intends to overcharge you.

Mr. Sturtz is a founder and the chief executive of RepairPal, a Web site (and an iPhone app) that culls several databases to estimate how much a specific car repair should cost where you live. (For body work, there is the Web site DentBetty, which the Bits blog wrote about on Monday.)

Car shops estimate labor costs using manuals or databases to tell them how long specific jobs will take. RepairPal uses one of those databases for time figures. But that’s not enough information to get a final price. A repair may require more than one of those jobs. For instance, you couldn’t replace the thermostat without also changing the coolant, which a manual would list as two separate jobs.

So RepairPal said it hired more than two dozen master mechanics, who spent 14 months assembling a list of all of the procedures that go into any one complete repair.

Then, to get a complete picture of the labor costs, the company said it surveyed thousands of shops around the country and applied the average local hourly rate to each repair job.

The final piece of the puzzle was to build a list of all of the parts needed for each repair and to price the parts. The consulting mechanics reviewed original equipment parts –- usually the most expensive –- as well as aftermarket parts they considered reliable (mostly in the midprice range).

When all of that data is mashed together, you can find that to replace a head gasket on a 2004 V-6 Honda Accord in New York City would cost $1,029 to $1,392 ($248 to $395 for the parts and $781 to $997 for labor). In Cairo, Ga, it would cost $785 to $1,081 (parts, $248 to $395; labor, $537 to $686).

The site also recently added a new feature: pricing on scheduled maintenance. That was particularly difficult, Mr. Sturtz said, because the work needed in a checkup varies depending on the kind of driving being done — a car driven mostly in commuter traffic will need different services than one with an uncluttered highway commute.

While RepairPal can price those add-ons, the only way to know which ones you need is to consult your owner’s manual.

There is a trove of other information on the site as well. You can look up problems most common to your car, see recalls and ask questions of fellow owners. There is also a database of shops with reviews, just in case your RepairPal research shows that your shop is overcharging and you need to find a new one.