Do you ever feel like the auto repair shop is out to get you?  

Yeah that happens a lot. Sometimes, they say somethings broken, you pay for it, but they do nothing, because its not broken. If you have a friend or a relative that knows a little bit about cars, ahve them look at your car, and make sure they know everything thats wrong, and if they say somethign else is broken then refuse to pay for it, and say you want to drive with a broken one. ALso, sometimes they will accidentally break something in the car, and charge you to fix it, even though you might have gotten it replaced last week. Its how auto mechanic shops get their money. They also do the same thing with paint jobs, charge cheapbut it comes off within a year.

I feel that the dealerships are out to get their car owners more than the auto repair shops. The dealers charge a lot more to fix your car than some smaller repair shops. I think the dealerships will find things wrong with your car that are not problems at all but they are trying to make extra money off of us. I would stay away from dealerships to fix my car and would go to s repair shop. You can always get a second opinion if you feel like they are ripping you off.

I may feel like,though it depends on the type of auto repair shop

I had experiences with shops that want to scam you out of your money and don't fix a d*** thing.But I go to Tuffys over here where i live and they only fix what has to be fix and don't charge any outrages prices

I know how you feel. I had to put a fuel pump in my 96 jimmy and the shop hit me for 1200.00 in labor. And it only took him like 3 hrs. When I asked why he charged so much, he only said "because I can"

this is very common in US. the car repair shops are big scams here. it happened with me too. that time i was very new with car, don't know much about car. i went for oil change. they told they will do free check-up for my car. i thought how great they are. they did the check and told me that all four brake drums are in poor condition, u need to replace them immediately. i got scared! i changed those witha cost of almost $,1000. later i realised that my earlier drum was good and that was from company parts and i don't know what the parts they gave and not good at all. after that incident i simply don't give any chance to say anything. if they recomend anything i took that recomendation and try to studied alot to know abt that in net and then if i realise it is the time to replace then i do that in next oil change.

Lets get things in their right perspective. First of all we wouldnt bring the car to a repair shop if we didnt know the owner right? So assuming the shop is a trusted one there are 2 things that can happen. Its obvious that there is something broken that needs to be fixed so the mechanics tries to fix the problem. More often than not when the mechanic tries to fix this problem the particular part being fixed is attached or related to another nearby part that if removed or touched something unwanted may happen (which often happens). That is why the repair of the problem costs more. Secondly is that even if we know the owner of the shop we dont really know his personnel right? Also our car isnt unique and there may be other car identical to yours in the shop as well right? Now heres the problem - some parts on your car MAY be SWAPPED with an inferior one on the identical car just to have the identical car's problem fixed so it can leave the shop. I'm not kidding! This often happens. So my dad taught me this. Never leave your car overnight in the shop. If repair, etc. would take longer than a day you may want to hire a mechanic to do the job right in your home where you can look over the job. (I guess this was my longest post ever at Mylot!)

Where I live they now charge $75.00 an hour to work on a car and they mark up the parts. I have a pretty decent mechanic and he'll let you order the parts yourself and have them ship it to him from the auto supply. That helps some but not enough.

Yes, especially woman. We can so eaily be conned if we don't know a clue going into the shop. I say that because that is the reason why we have some repair shops around here that have ladies day for oil changes! Why not men day? Woman typically do not like being under the hood.

if you bought your car on the big dealer it would be better off to take it to them and they're not gonna screw you, thats what my husband do now whenever he need to service the car coz you get the quality service rather than going to those small shop they really gonna get you screwed.