We have a 2001 Saturn station wagon that we are planning to milk for every mile possible. For the last year, the heater has been on again and off again. In Alaska, "off again" in the Winter is a disaster, the window turns into a sheet of ice and you bring an ice scraper to scrape your frozen breath from the inside of the window every 3 minutes. With the whole family in the car, it's full time scraping. If we were lucky, the heater would run for a few minutes every hour and defrost the windows. Saturn said about $700 to replace the wiring harness.
Well, I bought a new EOS 40D camera over the last couple days and was catching some flak about spending money on non-essentials when the car needs repair etc. So I decided to finally pull the dashboard, the radio, the vents, the heater (took about 10 minutes is all actually), and sitting directly in view, right in front of me, is a burned wire. I open the connector it's on and find it's melted inside it. I tap the connector and the heater comes on. Tap it again, heater goes off. One pair of wire snips and 20 minutes later, I've got the wire cut off the burned connector and jumpered with a wire-nut.
$700.... $700 my ass. Total repair cost was 5.12 cents and maybe an hour of time total (including doofus factor that Saturn wouldn't suffer.) I really do despise that dealership.
Stumble This
The same situation happened to me:
The company that's shipping my stuff when I make my move wanted $70 to crate up my HDTV. Not bad,I thought. "What kind of crate will you put it in?" I ask.
"Oh, the guys will get some really heavy duty cardboard and make sure it's all secure."
Yeah, no thanks. A trip to Home Depot, a sheet of plywood, two 2x4s, a table saw and a hour or so later I had myself a wooden trunk for my tv. Not only do I trust it a lot more than cardboard, but I don't have to just throw it away when I get there. It'll go in the closet and hold blankets or something.
When taken to a repair service, most work is going to be a rip off. Dealerships are much worse. I wish I could find that article I read that talked about how Dealers will (on average) charge over twice what a national auto repair chain will.
This is why I hate electronic cars so much, if the computer breaks you're fucked.
Agreed Farhad. Saturn was unable to differentiate here between simply needing to jumper around a melted connection versus installing a entire wiring harness, factory mint. If the idea is good service for a CAR, the harness sounds great. If the idea is good service for a CUSTOMER, then they are utterly screwing me over.