How to Find a Good Auto Mechanic

Video Transcript

Hi this is Jeff Wong with Expert Village and today we're going to learn the basics of maintaining your vehicle. Now the first step in finding a good mechanic is you can talk with your friends. Hopefully if they have the same make and model of your car, they'll have a little insight into who can help you out. Now the next thing that you can do is to look in your local phonebook. Now what you want to do is after you look up several car mechanics in your area, you want to give them a call and if you know what service you need with your vehicle, you can ask for a price quote or an approximate quote and compare several prices and you should be able to tell what the average price should be for a certain job. So you want to look for a mechanic that specializes in your particular make. Say if your car is made in Japan and is of a certain model that they specialize in that. Since they probably have more experience with that model of car, they'll probably do a better job. So another thing you can do when deciding which mechanic you should go to is you can go to the Better Business Bureaus' website and you can look up the name of the company and see if there's any complaints or how the customers' have rated that particular mechanic. Another thing you can look for when looking up a mechanic is you should be able to find out whether they have ASE certified mechanics. Which means that the mechanics have passed a test that says that they have the mechanic skills that are required, hopefully to fix your vehicle. And also you can look up if the shop is triple A accredited. This means that their work and services have been verified by Triple A. Once you've picked a mechanic they're several things you can look for when you go to the shop. First thing is, you can look for posted prices on the wall and the prices that you were quoted over the phone should be similar or be the same as those prices that are posted. Once you bring your car in, you should be able to have the mechanic look over your car and assess any repairs that need to be made. And before any work is actually done on the vehicle, you're entitled to approve that work. So if you know what repairs need to be made to your car, you can call around to dealers or other parts shops and find out how much that part should cost. The mechanic doing the service work on your car may charge a little bit more, but the price should be within the relative ball park of any other retailer. So if you believe that any of the work that a mechanic may recommend is not valid, you can always take your vehicle to another mechanic and ask for a second opinion. Before the work has begun, you should ask the mechanic how long the warranty is on both the parts and the labor. And also ask him to give a full explanation of the work with details of what exactly is wrong with your vehicle and what needs to be changed. So once you approve the work on your vehicle be sure to tell the mechanic to keep all the old parts. Because once the work is done, you want to take a look at the old part and verify that the part had actually been changed for a new one.

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