Owning a modern car is getting more expensive by the day. In the past, car salespeople had to be in your face to get you to buy a unit. Today, the client is begging the dealership to take their hard-earned money (don’t get me started on the ridiculously high markups).
Someone once said, most suffering comes from the failure to adapt and resist change. While that might be true, sometimes, people rebel because they know the things you want to do are not in their best interest.
Sam of Samcrac YouTube channel has earned quite a following for getting his hands dirty with cars. He believes half the repairs car owners pay dearly for can be done at home for a few bucks without drawing a sweat.
Due to his ingeniousness in buying lemons at auctions and getting them to run for cheap (sometimes), he’s become a favorite car wizard of sorts to close friends and family when they get stuck with hefty repairs.
In a previous post, he called out a local repair shop for trying to rip off his stepmom, charging her $914 for a 2-minute fix. On his latest upload, he calls out another local BMW dealership for overcharging his brother for a cabin air filter swap, among other repairs on his BMW 5 Series.
Sam makes some solid arguments. “These new dealerships keep getting bigger and more extravagant. Some of them are like visiting a museum. Even my local Lincoln dealership, which sold a total of thirteen cars last year, looks like this and has a fancy cappuccino machine,” he revealed.
Part of Sam’s confusion is how these dealerships are able to fund their high-end operations making meager sales in a competing market. He has a clue and feels they make most of their profit from the service center.
While he’s not opposed to having work done at the dealerships (some dealerships offer cheaper repairs compared to independent repair shops), he’s not comfortable getting charged excessively for simple maintenance.
His brother took his BMW to a local dealership for a quick recall repair and returned home with $1,000+ in recommended service. Most services on the quote sheet looked reasonable. However, a few raised eyebrows.
He felt $415 for a cabin air filter service was absurd since they are one of the simplest things to do on a car. But since he didn’t know what the job entailed, he decided to find out for himself.
"Now maybe it’s because it’s one of these hybrids, or because they are buried somewhere, and it takes an hour to get to them, but either way, today we are going to find out if this is a literal rip-off or these complex new cars are getting more difficult to service,” Sam said.
Well, Sam paid $9.50 for a pair of BMW 5 Series cabin air filters. It also took him less than ten minutes to replace the filters in the car. Surprisingly, it was his first time replacing a cabin air filter on that specific car model.
What do you think? Was his argument justified? We'd appreciate your thoughts in the comments section below.
Humphrey is a car enthusiast whose love and passion for automobiles extended into collecting, writing, driving, and working on cars. He got his passion for cars from his Dad, who spent thousands of hours working on his old junky 1970 E20 Toyota Corolla. Years later, he would end up doing the same with a series of lemons he’s owned throughout his adult life. Full profile
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