Hi! I'd love the feedback of anyone on the following repairs recommendations the shop gave me today. I've had my 2007 Prius since 2011 so very familiar with its history. This shop was great on a repair last year but this time I received a text with a laundry list of expensive repairs and I had to call and ask them to walk me through each on of these items. I just get very leerily when a place recommends a long list of maintenance/repair items worth thousands of dollars and they didn't seem too thrilled in explaining to me what all of the items were like I was just going to drop $5000 in repairs on a whim. I told them I can only afford what is absolutely necessary to be done today. Which is true. I took it to the shop because I went to get my state safety/emissions inspection and the inspector heard my car and said you have an exhaust leak so I drove it to the mechanic right after. Exhaust leak where muffler and midpipe connect is what the mechanic has listed and basically saying all of the exhaust components(i didn't take a photo of the list but it was the muffler and like 5+ things need to be replaced - a $1300 repair. I had to agree to this because my safety and emission inspection is due before I can renew my car registration and don't have time to shop around. Is that normal for an exhaust leak? I can update with all of the things replaced when I get it. Control arms - it says cracked bushings. They said within a year to take care of this. Sway bar links leaking. No explanation for this one - I actually didn't see it on the repair quote - just on the findings after I got off the phone with them. Also recommended a transmission fluid flush and some other break fluid flush. I don't DIY anything on my except like windshield wipes and I'm going to handle the air filter. Thank You for reading and your thoughts!
Auto Mechanics do this with older cars they don't want to work on anymore because a repair estimate costing more than the value of the car usually gets them out of ever having to work on it again. To be clear, you took your car to the wrong place... If you have an exhaust leak, go to a muffler shop and have them fix it with a little welding, or maybe simply replace the flange gasket. Your auto repair shop was more interested in price gouging you to replace an entire exhaust system rather than patch the leak. As for the other problems, they're all fairly normal for a 19 year old car and no need to spend money on anything other than what safety / emissions inspection requires you to fix.
IMHO; I would take it to a muffler shop for a repair; if that's the only thing holding-up the safety inspection. $1300 seems steep and maybe a new exhaust system. The rest of it sounds and smells a bit fishy. Leaky sway bar links - usually bushings??? Did they include a few muffler bearings to top it off too? In my state; you can just pay the registration fee, in order to avoid the late penalty; but won't receive your registration stickers (tags) until the car clears all it hurtles. Sometimes all you need is a few extra weeks or a month to take care of everything - our DMV understands this. Good Luck....
exactly.. safety inspections has become a milking cow for shops that does the inspection. Just have it inspected and go with what the safety inspection report. I prefer a "safety inspection" shop instead of a dealer or major repair shop.
I once took a car in to a shop I had not used before for an oil change because the usual shop didn't have an opening and I needed to go on a trip. The new shop did a "complementary inspection" where they found many thousands of dollars of work that needed to be done. On returning from the trip took the list to our usual shop to see how much of it was actually needed. The mechanic's answer - none of it.
Muffler shop. Brake fluid needs changing or you risk problems. Every 2-4 years. The fluid naturally absorbs water. This water causes internal damage (rust, etc,) the abs system is very expensive to repair. The control arms once the bushings start cracking yes. Those bushings affect tire wear. If your tires are wearing evenly your ok.
2-4 years is highly exaggerated, I've owned cars that hasn't done any brake fluid changes for more than 10 years and they are fine. ABS units on the Prius/Camry are known to fail for some random reasons. I have a Prius that I've never changed the fluid for more than 6 years, never done a brake job. I've seen cars that has seized calipers because the bracket for the hoses rusted out and compressed the lines (Honda/Ford) and that's not the issue with the brake fluid. Usually surface cracks on the bushings are not really a concern, it's when the bushings separate and causes your control arms to move and cause knocking sounds. Dealers will usually spot this as needing replacement but to be honest I told my friends don't listen to those guys, it's been years and it's still ok. I've seen worst control arm bushing on BMWs/Volvo that needed attention than on the Prius (it ain't a driving machine)
The brake booster pump is more likely to fail when you change the fluid and modern day fluid doesn't absorb water like it did back in the day.
It's been talked about on her several times... The blonde haired guy with red Prius with black stripes that match up with tinted tops of OEM tailights was the first one I remember saying this is why he's reluctant to change the fluid. Then I did some research and it definitely seemed like people with booster pump failure were more likely to be people who changed fluids than people who never changed their fluid. Also this was posted on here last week and makes me wonder if a vehicle with regen braking is ever going to heat up brake fluid enough to reach a boiling point where water in the system get dangerous:
Have you seen anyone speculate as to any causal mechanism to explain it? That would be some tricky math to do, especially the part for deciding if that also supports the converse, that people who changed fluids were more likely to have the pump fail (which is really the question of interest). It'd be interesting to see the research and numbers and math. And a plausible mechanism for explaining it would go a long way to shoring up the idea that something real, besides a sampling artifact, is involved.
Could it be that for many of these people the brakes start acting up, because the ABS is on the way out, so they change the fluid hoping that will fix it. It doesn't, then the ABS kicks the bucket for real. Voila, "changing the brake fluid kills the ABS". I had a mechanic change our brake fluid a while back. Because I have the crappy Techstream dongle that cannot handle certain brake issues, and didn't want to get stuck if things went wrong if I did it. This is the local guy you go to when you have a Toyota or Honda problem that nobody else can figure out. Anyway, if he thought changing the brake fluid was going to blow up the ABS, he would have said so. Which he did not.
Playing Devil's advocate: it could be that this braking system is inordinately picky about the cleanliness of the fluid. I live in a fairly dusty and often windy place, and it is possible that somebody who leaves their brake reservoir open too long later suffers when the itty bitty pieces of silicate rock from the desert dust circulate through. This would be pieces too small for the filter to catch. There is some precedent for that sort of thing. People who work on their engines using green Scotch Brite pads later find that the abrasive that fell off of them, and was not completely cleaned out, goes round and round and causes wear. For instance: To be clear, I have absolutely no evidence to support the hypothesis that the Prius brake system is that finicky.
