Everybody loves a good repair story - right? Well, here's a good one - my daughter's vehicle is a 2015 Buick Enclave with around 104,000 miles on it. We bought it about 2 years ago & it had 94,000 miles on it from a Buick dealer - it was in exceptional condition.

She's in Marquette, MI. finishing a specialized degree at NMU, & we are 380 miles away. About a month ago, it throws a code for something going on with the evap system. So she takes it to a small mom & pop repair shop she has used before & they determine the gas cap needs to be replaced. Cost to diagnose & install a new cap = $100.00. OK - if that fixes it then it's only a hundred dollars. Late the next day, the light comes on again - it's freaking her out. She drives it about 2 weeks & everything seems fine - OK - so a 100k mile GM vehicle has a dash light on - what else is new? I'm surprised as hell there weren't more well before this!

Then, it's starting to act-up when she fills with gas - it starts stalling & sputtering, & just acting strange. She goes & gets scanned at Auto Zone again - the guy tells her it might be a purge valve. She goes back to the repair shop who put a new gas cap on & they tell her it's going to need the purge valve replaced & the repair cost is $600.00. Heck, I've never dealt with this before so I tell her she's going to have to take it to the local GM dealer in Ishpeming - here we go! She calls on Monday & talks to the service department & tells the guy what's going on - he says "it sounds like the purge valve." So I go on YouTube for a video on replacing a purge valve & it looks easy as hell. I look on Rock Auto to see what they cost & they are in the $15-20.00 range. I order a genuine GM part & have it shipped to her. I send her the repair video & she watches it the next day & decides she is going to tackle the repair. The part comes, she finally gets some decent weather a few days after the part arrives & she has NO problem installing it - took her 20 minutes. Problem completely solved - vehicle runs great! Auto Zone clears the code that afternoon & it's been about 4 days now & all is well.

So where did the repair quote of $600.00 come from? She calls that place earlier today & talks to the lady who gave her the quote, wondering how a $20.00 part & 20 minutes to replace justifies a $600.00 repair bill? And even a chick can do it! The lady hems & haws & gives her some sort of a mumbo-jumbo answer. Moral of the story: be aware & research stuff before being the Coho & coughing-up the $$.

My theory is they just hold us for ransom all the time. New cars are so expensive, fixing the old ones at any cost looks cheap. Most people are not smart enough to think like you and your daughter. I’d insert something about look at how people vote but that would get this moved! LOL. So, repair shops just swing for the fence every time and get one job out of three but make the same money. I think lots of trades do that. I had a plumber several years ago tell me he doubled his prices on bids and had half the work but made more money. It’s the American way now days. They call it greed.

Not all repair shops,are like that,their has to be some mark up,or they would be out of business.Yes that is very excessive mark up,Yes I have a repair shop been operating since 1987,by operating honestly&fair.

I would like to see that $600 estimate in writing just to see where they came up with that number. I would also have a talk with the guy that threw the $100 gas cap at it for no apparent reason. So many "techs" throw caps at cars for any EVAP code when that is rarely the fix and there are cap testers available to see if the cap is actually the issue.

Find someone to look up the flat rate repair time on it. That is how most quotes are made. I would say a huge majority of shops use labor guides to bill customers.

My work services hundreds of repair shops. Out of all the ones I have been in I only know one old school guy who works on a stop watch. When you go to ask him for a check he walks over and hits stop on his timer, then resumes when he gets back to work.

A friend of mine once had an issue with a shop stacking labor time. He had a steering rack replaced on a 2015 Durango Hemi, and had them do the oil pan gasket. They stacked the labor like two totally different jobs, when in reality the steering rack replacement already had all the stuff removed making the oil pan job very simple. He talked to the owner of the place and they ended up reducing the bill by a lot. This was a job my friend could have done but he didn't want to. Any person not knowledgeable about cars would have paid double labor.

I make a living off of other shops telling people stupid expensive repairs or not actually being able to fix the problems.

So far this summer 3 shops quoted AC compressors to my clients. 2 were fords with bad coils and one was just a bad fuse. Yes misfires on Fords turn off the ac.

Another was a quote for turbos on an ecotec with 4 cylinders misfiring. It had zero psi compression on 2 cylinders and 2 others had bad coils. A 6 cylinder running on 2 cylinders will throw an underboost code. It needs an engine.

Charcoal canister quote was for a disconnected hose.

Complete front end quote when it was just a noisy bearing.

I could go on and on.

Seems like the lack of good mechanics filled the market with rip off artists and mechanics who don't know what they are doing.

Glad your daughter got the best of the situation and new found confidence to trust you and herself more than a shop.

From personal experience the 'bad' shops far out number the 'good' shops (not just pricing but overall work quality).

While I have plenty of horror stories, I'll share a 'feel good' story from several years back involving my then 75 yr old mother. She took her Corolla in to the local Toyota dealership for an oil change (as usual) and they did a 'multi-point' inspection while the car was there.

Everything was good except........ the cabin air filter. My Mother didn't know about it, and I had forgotten about it because of the junk I usually drive. Rather than try and scare an old woman into buying the filter (and god knows what else), they called me, explained the situation and told me straight up I could save about $60.00 going to Amazon for the filter and replacing it myself, which I did. They only charged her for the oil change.

It may seem like a small thing, but it impressed me.