One of the abilties Brian and I like great on our new (well, -yr-antique) Honda Fit is the little Maintenance Minder at the dash. It notifies you whilst it is time for an oil trade or another normal issuer, so you do now not want to preserve tune of all of it your self. However, when the Maintenance Minder popped up a message a week or so inside the past that the automobile changed into due for provider, it posed a chunk of a catch 22 situation for us.
You see, with our vintage vehicle, we typically went to a nearby garage, Schwartz and Nagle, for service. The biggest benefit of this changed into that it's miles only some blocks from our residence, so it emerge as easy for me to drop the car off in the morning, walk domestic, and circulate lower back to choose out it up every time it was ready. (Brian could trip his motorbike to paintings, or I might also need to drop him off at paintings earlier than taking the automobile in.) And we would normally placed the mechanics at Schwartz and Nagle to be both geared up and honest. To take one example, we once added within the vintage Accord because it grow to be having problem starting. After attempting over and over, but, they could not reproduce the hassle?This is, the automobile never did no longer begin for them. They must recommend a pair of factors that would had been causing the problem, and a couple of methods we'd deal with it if it took place once more, but they couldn't simply repair it...So they failed to charge us something. On different sports, too, they've informed us no longer to worry about minor troubles, in preference to pushing us into doing costly maintenance.
The trouble, although, is that the primary time I took our new Fit to Schwartz and Nagle for an oil trade, they informed me after I picked it up that it seems this automobile needs artificial oil?The extra high priced type. And that sounded a bit exquisite to me, because it did not appear to jive with what our owner's manual said. In the segment on oil changes, the guide said that 0W20 engine oil modified into encouraged, but a artificial oil will be used
So when the Maintenance Minder told us it was time for the "A12" service (change the oil, rotate the tires, replace a couple of filters, inspect the drive belt, and check the brake), we dithered a bit over whether to take it to the dealer or to the local guys. The trouble with the dealership is that, although it's only about a mile from us as the crow flies, to get there the crow has to fly directly over Route 1, a major thoroughfare. There is an on-ramp from a nearby residential neighborhood that deposits you right in front of the dealership, so theoretically it would be possible to walk home along that route, but it doesn't look terribly safe.
After a bit of debate, we decided to call up the dealership and see whether they could fit us in on Saturday, and whether we would need an appointment for the service. I called and talked to a nice lady called Zenya, who said that it would be best to have an appointment, but she could indeed fit us in on a Saturday. However, when I asked her how long it would take, she said that if we wanted to wait there rather than drop it off, it would be best to bring the car in early—between 7 and 8 am. That way, we'd only have to wait about two hours. If we couldn't come in until later in the day, then the wait would be longer. So, given a choice between (a) getting up at early on Saturday and waiting two hours at the dealership, (b) getting up at a normal time and waiting three or more hours at the dealership, or (c) attempting to walk home from the dealership, and then walk back to get the car, by way of a highway on-ramp, it became clear that the only reasonable option was (d) take it to the local guys after all.
Fortunately, this turned out to be the right move in more ways than one. First of all, they were able to fit us in that very day. They got the job done in less than the two hours the dealer would have taken if we'd brought it in at 7 am on a Saturday, and I didn't have to sit there waiting for it. Second, they charged us only $96 rather than the $225 quoted to us by the dealership. Since they'd been the last ones to service the car, they knew that the air and cabin filters had actually been replaced at that time and weren't likely to need replacing again—so they just checked them and found that, sure enough, they were fine. (And even if they had done the filter replacement, the cost would still have been about $75 below the dealer's price). Moreover, our local guys also helpfully steered us toward a rebate from Mobil 1 (maker of the synthetic motor oil they use) that could save us an extra $15. They even printed out a duplicate receipt that we could mail in for the rebate, so we'd still have an original copy to keep.
And, talking of that synthetic motor oil: when I asked them about it, they explained that the reason they said our car needs a synthetic oil is that the 0W20 formulation the manual calls for is actually available only in a synthetic version. So it was actually the dealer, not our local mechanics, who was going against Honda's own recommendations by giving us a petroleum-based oil in a different weight. So, in short, this turned out to be a case in which the local business, as opposed to the big chain, had literally everything going for it. The location was much more convenient, and the service was better, and so was the price. My takeaway from this experience: always try the local business first. You may discover that there's no reason to consider the chain at all.
