Thread: Toyota Hilux Servicing

Originally Posted by Bill999

stop taking your vehicle to fuck wits

in saying that my highly skilled mobile mechanic and offsider managed to service six of our picking machines and only fill 5 with oil
number 6 promptly seazed

human error is still a thing that exists but these guys have saved me a lot more than this one day/issue cost me

I also unseazed it and got it working again but its never been the same since

A sage comment - both for the first line and the second observation...

If the dealer proves to be hopeless, who the heck do you go to next? It's almost worth pirate importing the factory computer and doing it yourself when you consider the cost incurred from staying with dealer servicing in this case. It's not just consequential damage it's the vehicle down time and fart arsing about getting the thing in which is an entire cost far in excess of the basic 'cost of service'. We seem to seriously struggle with competent mechanical support in NZ - I know of several occasions recently where professional mechanics have started into a job and got to a position of 'oh fu*k' where the job just trippled in labour costs and an extra factor of parts etc etc.

I had one recently on a little Tiida, WOF fail on lower arm bushes top hats and something I can't recall. Quote $2K. Ended up saying stuff it, got my mate who's a mechanic to do the thing at my place for a bit of labour, food and use all my gear and ended up all the WOF parts, servicing the CVT, replacing the plugs, and additionally doing front struts belt and a couple of joints for about $1400. I realise that the commercial boys have overheads and bricks and mortar to fund but jey-sus, their markup on labour and parts is frightening. Getting that job done by them who failed the thing would have been probably $3500 at the end of it on a $3000 car.

One place where the bigger boys like the dealers can beat me is at cost of lubricants - the dealer charge for oil for my vehicle is $1.20 less than I can buy it for and to be honest I get it at a reasonable sharp rate (well under retail).