Is Your Car a Money Pit? Here’s How To Decide When To Repair vs. Replace
Today’s cars, trucks, and SUVs last longer and perform better than any vehicles that came before. But that kind of efficiency comes with a drawback that wasn’t an issue in the days of planned obsolescence — modern cars outlast their parts.
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For people who drive older cars, every trip to the mechanic demands a difficult decision — is the repair worth the cost? GOBankingRates asked the experts to find out when to plunk down cash for the fix and when to cut your losses.
Transmissions Are Often — But Not Always — a Lost Cause
In any discussion about migraine-inducing repairs, transmissions wind up at or near the top of the list — and for good reason.
According to J.D. Power and Associates, the exact cost of a new transmission can vary, but, on average, you can expect to spend a ballpark of between $2,500 and $5,000 to replace an automatic transmission, including parts and labor. For manual transmissions, the fees are a little lower, ranging from $1,500 to $3,000. However, if you drive a luxury vehicle, expect the cost to tick up to $6,000 including parts and labor.
You might think that most of the time, you’d do well to simply find another car at an affordable price instead of replacing a transmission. However, this doesn’t always have to be the case.
“Many people will say that if you need to repair the engine or transmission, it’s simply not worth it,” said Mark Beneke, co-owner of Westland Auto Sales in Fresno, Calif. “While these are big repairs, they can be very effective at providing your vehicle new life. We’ve completed plenty of engine and transmission jobs at our dealerships and have customers still driving that same vehicle many years later.”
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Blown Engines Are Just as Bad or Worse
If the transmission isn’t the least enviable repair in the automotive world, it’s second only to the engine itself.
Replacing an engine can be formidably expensive. While the price may vary depending on the brand, car model, and year of your car, AutoZone suggests that you should prepare to spend between $3,000 and $8,000 on a new engine, with parts and labor. Even if you want to attempt the replacement yourself, you can still expect to spend at least $2,000.
Flood Damage Has a Way of Causing Vehicle-Wide Problems
Water might be the essence of life, but it’s the bane of vehicles.
As an insurance company, Progressive has seen a lot of the issues that can plague cars, and water damage is no exception. On the company’s website, you can find some of the signs of a flood-damaged car, including odors, discolored interiors, dirt and sand in unusual places, rust and moisture, smoke and odd noises, as well as electronic issues.
The company’s website advises car owners about the price issues related to significant flooding: “Minor flooding that’s quickly drained can often be repaired, but vehicles that are severely flooded or sit in water for days are often considered unrepairable by insurance companies, which leads to the car being declared a total loss.”
Tracing Electrical Issues is a Long, Expensive Guessing Game
Just one of the issues related to water damage is electrical issues — which are no small side effect.
“The area that we would say would provide the biggest headache is electrical issues,” said Beneke. “If you have shorts occurring or other electrical issues with the wiring, it can be extremely difficult to pinpoint where the issue is coming from. A technician would have to go through each individual wire throughout the entire car to test where the problem could be. As you can imagine, it is a very time-consuming job and the labor costs can rack up quickly.”
Fixing Chassis Damage is Hard, Expensive, and Rarely Worth It
There are a few ways that a vehicle’s chassis can be damaged, but no matter the cause, the end result is usually the same.
“The first type of repair that comes to mind when asked whether it’s worthwhile are repairs where the chassis is damaged,” said Nicholas Edwards, a quality control specialist. “Either through rust damage or misalignment from a forceful impact, the structural integrity of a chassis is critical. Removing and repairing rust damage is a long process, realigning a chassis can only be carried out by experienced technicians with expensive equipment. In those instances, it’s more than likely that many other parts on the vehicle are salvageable. It’ll be stripped and all components sold separately will return more than the cost of the repair.”
Rust Has an Insatiable Appetite
If you spot a rust patch, what you’re actually seeing is the beginning of the end of your car — and almost no repair will change that.
“The biggest of all issues that we highly recommend everyone stays away from is rust.” said Beneke. “Rust is like cancer to a vehicle. Once it spreads, it corrodes nearly everything within a vehicle. If caught early, surface rust can be fairly inexpensive to correct. If allowed to continue, rust will eat away at anything metal and since vehicles are made primarily of metal, it can affect the safety of your vehicle. When we purchase our own vehicles, we may consider a vehicle with engine or transmission issues and maybe even PCM issues. Electrical issues we tend to shy away from as they tend to turn into too big of problems. Rust, however, we do not touch. If there is any sign of rust on a vehicle, we scrap it.”
Laura Bogart contributed to the reporting for this article.
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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com: Is Your Car a Money Pit? Here’s How To Decide When To Repair vs. Replace
