Cars And Car Reviews

I found a great way to save a ton of money on the scheduled maintenance on your new cars and trucks.

My wife and I purchased a brand new Toyota 4Runner last year and we absolutely love everything about it. The only thing I dreaded about purchasing a new vehicle was taking it in for scheduled maintenance. It seems to be a scheme of dealerships to charge you an arm and a leg to do things to your vehicle that isn’t really necessary.

So, when it came time for the scheduled 15,000 mile maintenance on the 4Runner I was expecting to spend anywhere from $200 to $400 for this. After reading several online forums and founding out about these prices I called Toyota Of Melbourne to inquire as to 1. What do you do for the scheduled maintenance and 2. How much is it going to cost me?

Holding my owner’s manual as I spoke with a service rep on the phone I was surprised to find out all the additional "recommended" maintenance items from the dealer vs what Toyota recommends on their web site. After my inquiry on the phone I learned that the 15,000 mile maintenance for my 4Runner was going to cost $249. The dealer had added things like changing the transmission fluid and decarbonization of the fuel injectors, things not recommended by Toyota corporate.

So I called and made an appointment and this morning, with my owners manual in hand, I drove to Toyota Of Melbourne and said all I wanted done was the maintenance recommended by my owner’s manual and nothing else. I was expecting to pay a round $100 or so but was shocked to see my invoice come to only $27! I saved nearly 10 times what it would have cost me just by insisting they do only the Toyota recommended items. I do want to say though that my service rep was very courteous and never pressured me in any way.

So, there’s the moral of the story. The way to save money, and lots of it, on your scheduled maintenance is to call your dealer, ask them what do they do, what do they charge and then have them do only what’s recommended in your owner’s manual.

It really can’t get any simpler than that.

Alan LeStourgeon

Tags: car maintenance, toyota, toyota 4runner, scheduled maintenance

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 at 7:34 am and is filed under Cars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.