Biggest car repair bill you've ever had?

[Jazoli]

21 minutes ago, Dyslexic Viking said:

This is related. How much does a garage usually charge per hour in the UK? Here, I think you won't find anyone under 100 and main dealers in the cities it is probably well over 140. But my figures may be out of date and it is even more expensive.

It’s similar here, £100/hr is the norm for a main dealer for a mainstream brand, premium brands are more, my independent charges £70/hr and is good value as I trust him to do as he should, unlike some spotty oik on a bonus scheme.

[Matty]

£800  to buy a second hand IB5 box, put new bearings in it and fit it to the car with a new clutch kit. On the ST150 after the diff came to live outside the old box. Still reckon I did bloody well there in fairness.

[Bmwdumptruck]

After buying my new Pug van in early 05, I returned it to the dealer for the first two services at 6 and 12k.  I nearly fell on the floor when they gave me the £200+ bill for just an oil change.  I think the whole garage heard me exclaim ‘does it really need gold plated fucking oil’.  My C15 before it had 3 services under warranty at £60 a time ten years earlier.  I’ve not paid a dealer since for any of my 4 wheel vehicles, I prefer to take a day off and diy it. 
My current VX Combo has a 21k 2yr service interval and as it only had 2years warranty it’s never seen the dealer since me driving it off their forecourt.  I just give it annual services at around 10k.  
My actual last dealer services was the bike in my avatar, my Yamaha Tenere.  Had the Hemel dealer do the 600mile one, nearly £200 🤦‍♂️, Then the 6k down the road at my  local dealer, nearly £300 for whats still a basic service.  Done the rest myself, they won’t see it again.  
Hate Stealers…….

[DavieW]

£140/hr for Audi/BMW etc. 

[Imhotep]

£1400 for a timing chain/clutch/AC repair on a BMW 116d

[bunglebus]

About the only thing I pay for is the cambelt to be done on the Passat, as I just can't be arsed with taking the lights and bumper off, pulling the crash bar forward and making sure I time it all correctly. Last time it also had the leaking water pump changed too as I just couldn't seem to access it. About £400 at a specialist I trust. Everything else I do myself including cambelts on every other car I've had that required one.

Sometimes I get fed up struggling on the drive but we must save so much money compared to Joe Average on motoring costs

[Bren]

Just over £1k. Valve stem seals on my BMW 545. 20 hours labour - there are 32 of the things. Other places were quoting 3 x that. The car came with a bill for £1500 for various jobs - at the bottom they mentioned the engine was smokey - not what you want to hear after spending £1500. Owner then baled out.

Our last vectra landed us with a bill for just under £900 when the aux belt interfered with the valve timing - it was better to spend that on a known quantity than buy someone elses' misery.

Given how expensive things have become four figure repairs are getting more common.

[Marina door handles]

About £1800..... I had a second hand engine fitted to my Porsche 944, this was about 25 years ago and I didn't have the garage space or kit to do it my self and that cost does include the price of the engine, so not really that bad. 

The reason I needed to replace the engine was down to my own mistake, I drove through a short- ish section of flooded road (having watched various other cars go through and make it just fine) I decided it would be okay.. Wrong! It seems that Porsche put the air intake a bit lower than most family hatchbacks and the engine took a big gulp of river water and put a con rod through the side of the block...... Its not the sort of mistake you repeat! 

 

[Rustybullethole]

About 30 years ago I took my first legit car, a mk1 metro to a local mini centre to have the carb twiddled after fitting a k and n filter. Matey did it there on the spot and showed me what was what. I gave him a drink for his time and expertise. That remains the only time i have paid for someone to work on my car. 
Think my biggest parts spends have been tyres on the two occasions i've felt flush and bought a full set brand spankers. 

[robt100]

For me, about £1,100 on the caddy for a replacement G/box, clutch and flywheel.

Best I've seen, probably my ex @DirtyDaily XJR project.....a recipt from a Rolls Royce and Bentley specialist (there's the first clue), for a service, replacement gearbox, and new headlining..... over £7k!!

[bangernomics]

12k w213 e300d hybrid.

I didn’t take them up on their kind offer. Car was worth about 15k at the time.

Thankfully it got written off.

[horriblemercedes]

2 hours ago, Dyslexic Viking said:

This is related. How much does a garage usually charge per hour in the UK? Here, I think you won't find anyone under 100 and main dealers in the cities it is probably well over 140. But my figures may be out of date and it is even more expensive.

About £40-60 per hour for a normal garage. I don't know about main dealers these days 

[MAF260]

£6k+ on a Maserati 3200GT. Cambelt service turned into something much bigger.

North of £5k on a Maserati GranSport. £3.5k of that was a new clutch and associated hardware  

£4k on a L322 Range Rover. Suspension parts, oil leak and DPF fun.

All with indies. I’d dread to think how much a main stealer would have bent me over for!

[Coprolalia]

The new Skoda is looking like it needs £1600+ of work; crankshaft oil seal, replacement cambelt, alternator tensioners, ARB bushes, rear electric struts (£600 from Skoda) and some other bits.

Dwarfed by my mate who just messaged to say his Merc GL has shat it's transfer case. £5k replacement bill.

[GeordieInExile]

1300 quid to get my 850 T5 through the MOT. Which I paid. 

[mk2_craig]

Nothing horrendous for me, fortunately. Wife however bought an MGF for about 2600 quid back in 2010, took it straight in to Bill the local MG specialist for "a service" expecting it to cost a couple of hundred plus whatever a fresh belt would be.

Bill took it upon himself to change all the discs and pads (without first asking/telling my wife) and threw her an invoice for £800! We quietly coughed up, but when the car shat its head gasket a few months later there was no way Bill was getting the work and we were never again customers of his. 

A later car of hers was 3 grands worth of slightly tired E46 convertible. I was grateful to the previous owner - who had clearly been treating it as some sort of rolling resto project - for hanging onto every invoice he had paid over his 24 month ownership period, I stopped counting the total after it reached £6k and was pleased that someone else had stumped up for four new tyres, complete replacement of brake and suspension components, alloy wheel refurbishment etc etc. All great selling points when we moved it on after a year! 

[Spiny Norman]

Corrected for inflation probably the £400-odd I paid in around 1997 to get the ZF gearbox in my E28 fully reconditioned. I loved the car but the box was starting to slip badle so I found a one man show in a dingy little shed in the south side of Glasgow who was willing and able to pull it apart and replace all the bands and clutches.

In absolute terms my single biggest bill wasn't even a repair as such, but 10 years later a full 4 year service with cambelt, coolant, brake fluid and all the other sundries on an Alfa 156 cost me about £700 at a specialist. Would have been even more at a dealer.

[AxWomble]

Repair? Everything seems to come to £70 when it all goes wrong for me. £65 for a 3 piece Valeo clutch kit for a Citroen AX after a pressure plate explosion, £65 posted for a MASSIVE secondhand hub and bearing assembly for a 2.8 Ducato from a man in a shed called Andy, £70 for handbrake hardware and cables for the same van when it locked up a wheel coming off a roundabout. 106 diesel never let me down but the most expensive batch of servicing was around the £80 mark. 
 

 

Edit - I'd clearly blocked out this traumatic memory -  £410 for a NoX sensor the first week of ownership of our Euro 6 Peugeot Boxer. Ouch. Still, someone, buy it please, all the expensive parts have already been replaced! 

[Schaefft]

Just over £2000 to have the Toyota Celsior welded up. Wasn't even a particularly complex job but that's what it costs nowadays.

[artdjones]

58 minutes ago, mk2_craig said:

Nothing horrendous for me, fortunately. Wife however bought an MGF for about 2600 quid back in 2010, took it straight in to Bill the local MG specialist for "a service" expecting it to cost a couple of hundred plus whatever a fresh belt would be.

Bill took it upon himself to change all the discs and pads (without first asking/telling my wife) and threw her an invoice for £800! We quietly coughed up, but when the car shat its head gasket a few months later there was no way Bill was getting the work and we were never again customers of his. 

A later car of hers was 3 grands worth of slightly tired E46 convertible. I was grateful to the previous owner - who had clearly been treating it as some sort of rolling resto project - for hanging onto every invoice he had paid over his 24 month ownership period, I stopped counting the total after it reached £6k and was pleased that someone else had stumped up for four new tyres, complete replacement of brake and suspension components, alloy wheel refurbishment etc etc. All great selling points when we moved it on after a year! 

Same happened to me with my Doblo. The previous owner had the van for a year and spent €2600 on it. He did 40k miles in that year, though. New discs and pads, new clutch, new shocks all round, new timing chain, 3 services etc. All I've done since in 3 years is service it and and put another 2 front shocks on, as the previous new ones (Japanarts) both cracked through the arb link brackets. 

[stuboy]

£250 car................. almost £400 on mot and getting the floor to swing arm drilled out and retapped due to previous owner welding a snapped head of the said bolt to arm

[mat777]

Far from the biggest bill I've ever had, but definitely the most outrageous bill compared to the issue at hand.... "the £500 headlight bulb", AKA reason #4372 why I'll never touch another L322 even with a bargepole

[Popsicle]

Car repair bills I think I've not done too bad over the past 35 odd years, worst I can recall is around £2k for a 2.8 Shogun engine back in the early 00's as ours had overheated and seized up. Mind you our Qashqai had a £1.3k spend on it last September, clutch, flywheel & a known good second hand gearbox, be lucky if the heaps worth a grand 🥲.

Vans are a totally different matter, spent some silly money keeping them earning for me, but then I have probably put over 3 million miles on them. £2k a throw for 4 new injectors on Sprinters several times. Similar money for gearbox's, diffs, propshafts, clutches and flywheels.

Even my current van has cost over £11k in servicing and repairs. Highest ones being £1.4k for a top end engine rebuild and in-tank pump and £1.2k for a clutch, flywheel, tandem pump and other bits.

I should have known when I bought it that it would be trouble, previous owners had sunk just over £4k on a recon engine!

[RoverFolkUs]

I do pretty much all work myself, it would be silly not to since its my job! However I did farm out a wheel bearing once a few years ago because I did not have the time and it had become rather urgent with an impending long trip at the time. Which makes my largest garage bill £170 or thereabouts

Engine replacement on my MK2 Focus cost £710 in the end, although I did replace the brake shoes and drums at the same time. But the rest of the cost involved doing an engine replacement *properly* - new service bits, plugs and leads, belts etc. Then a further £150 spend on the following MOT a couple of months later. Bear in mind this cost is for parts only at trade prices. Fluids and consumables are free to me, and my hourly rate is £0/hr to myself

At the time it made sense to do it, even though I paid less than that for the car itself a few years prior!

For the MG ZR which I bought and ended up deciding to near enough restore.... (Basically rectify a lifetime of overlooked maintenance and perhaps "lenient" MOTs) - my current spend on paper is £730 but I haven't updated my records recently so I suspect this is now somewhere in the £800 region. Once again, this doesn't include consumables and fluids which are free to me. The bulk of this cost is for a top end engine rebuild, reassembled with a new head gasket kit, all belts, filters, fluids and hoses, as well as repair panels to assist with the welding and a replacement body control module. Again, done properly to hopefully last a lifetime.

The Rover 620 I haven't started to add up yet, but I suspect is approaching £4-500 already to bring it up to a standard I'm happy with. Replacement arches + welding materials, set of tyres, parts and materials to sort the coolant and oil leaks, various non-essential cosmetic and comfort items. There have been plenty of free fixes on this car though, such as the parking brake, door switches, exhaust, gear linkage - so that's a bonus!

The Citroen Picasso is a right trooper, I've had it nearly 3 years now, just shy of 15k miles covered and all its had is a couple of services as required, 2x tyres, a wheel cylinder, track rod end and a power steering pressure switch. Servicing and tyres aside, that makes the biggest "expense" for a failed component to be £30 for the PAS switch! And they say French cars are shit....

[RoverFolkUs]

10 hours ago, Crackers said:

In anticipation of a sizeable chunk of money leaving my bank account to get my Jag running again,

If the suspicion is fuel starvation, some modern JLR vehicles have sneakily hidden low pressure fuel pumps in the wheel arch. I'm not too sure about an XF off the top of my head, but this may be worth bearing in mind. 

[warren t claim]

From our '93 Mondy thread...

"The crowning glory was a lad called Alan The Student. He had a W plate diesel off me and although he was totally clueless he was a nice enough fella and only worked part time and only did about 400 miles a week. At the time Kwik Fit had decent offers on oil changes for Ford Zetec engines, about £25 including filter, so I had a Kwik Fit card to make life easier. I knew his car, W809*** was due to need tyres in a week or so and as that particular Mondeo was pride of the fleet and due a plate soon I left him the Kwik Fit card and told him to sort them himself as I was recently single and away in Manchester that weekend banging some Scottish bird called Joanne. Anyway, I returned on the Monday (fucking hell she was dirty! Not much in the way of tits but a slender body to die for and went like a rabbit on amphetamine) to be greeted by an £800 bill! The cunts at Kwik Fit had seen the card and given Alan the whole manslaughter speech meaning he'd agreed to have not just two tyres but pads and discs front and rear! Obviously I was well pissed off but by that time there was fuck all I could do. A lesson learned."

[ProgRocker]

My last car: 2003 Nissan Almera 2.2 dCi. In July 2015 I had a garage replace the turbo. The old one was making a whistling noise and it was grinding my gears. So to speak. Over £1,500. Second most expensive was the replacement clutch in 2011, which cost £1,150.

During my ownership of that car between September 2010 and June 2021 I calculated that I had spent £7k on maintenance and servicing.

[New POD]

10 hours ago, mk2_craig said:

Nothing horrendous for me, fortunately. Wife however bought an MGF for about 2600 quid back in 2010, took it straight in to Bill the local MG specialist for "a service" expecting it to cost a couple of hundred plus whatever a fresh belt would be.

Bill took it upon himself to change all the discs and pads (without first asking/telling my wife) and threw her an invoice for £800! We quietly coughed up, but when the car shat its head gasket a few months later there was no way Bill was getting the work and we were never again customers of his. 

A later car of hers was 3 grands worth of slightly tired E46 convertible. I was grateful to the previous owner - who had clearly been treating it as some sort of rolling resto project - for hanging onto every invoice he had paid over his 24 month ownership period, I stopped counting the total after it reached £6k and was pleased that someone else had stumped up for four new tyres, complete replacement of brake and suspension components, alloy wheel refurbishment etc etc. All great selling points when we moved it on after a year! 

It's people like Bill that don't understand why they gradually go out of business. 

[Dave_Q]

£1900 for timing chain, inlet throttle valve and a few bits of pipe and gaskets on my Vito.

Engine out job due to timing chain at the back (OM651, dogshit engine)

This doesn't include about £300 of parts as I bought the chain kit and one injector that also needed doing.

[barefoot]

I spent £2,400 over two years and 9,000 miles on a £300 XJ8. My 944 and T2 have cost me considerably more.