Rant - parts prices

Right you are. Has anyone priced the hydraulic lift cylinders for a 900 convertible top? I swear I could have bought a whole 'nuther car for about the same price. And there is nothing particularly special about these cylinders, fabrication-wise, to make them so expensive.

Bill Jeffrey

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Grunff wrote:

Or a Mazda. A friend of mine who owns a large auto body shop says that Mazda body panels/plastic bits are the most expensive he's run into, even for their cheap cars like the Protege. It's reflected in the costs to insure them. I owned a Mazda at the time that had gotten hit and needed headlight and front trim and a fender replaced. He did the labor for free and charged me his cost for the parts, which was over $1,200 for a few bits of plastic and a used fender. Like he said, you'd think they were made of gold the way they charged for them.

snipped-for-privacy@madmousergraphics.com

design, print design, photography

Maybe they're not all that unique, but if it's a small-batch item, you're sharing in the tooling cost for it. Even Saab, I suppose, has engineers who design blindly, rather than seeing what's out there. Often an engineer can adjust their design to use a commonly available part, avoiding it being a custom or one-off job, but sometimes they either choose not to, or quality dicatate that they don't. Hard to say which it is in this case; I'd like to think it's the latter.

Dave Hinz

You know those films with slow, sinister cellos featuring in the music track...? Or am I thinking of another Spielberg item? Oh yes -- "Duel".

-- Andrew Stephenson

Really? I owned a 323 (actually a GLC, as it was called in the US), where I binked out a taillight lens. The dealer wanted less than $30 for the entire assembly and it came complete with bulbs installed. I thought it was a deal -- but that was many years ago, before they tried to make that model sound more exotic by renaming it "Protoge".

Walt Kienzle

Yup, I just found out how much 2 weeks ago. 5th bow cylinder on wife's 9-3CV was leaking like a sieve. Part alone was $465US from the dealer. It's listed at $405US from

Lucky for me, I have an extended warranty, and I was only out $100.

Matt

Yep. The repairs were on a 1990 Protege version of the 323 -- the hatchback. It was a great car, other than the expensve of the body parts. Mazda quit making them in 1994 or so and there are still a lot on the road. Stuff like headlight bulbs and tires and such were very cheap to replace. Just got expensive when you got into the body parts.

snipped-for-privacy@madmousergraphics.com

design, print design, photography

Last Japanese car I owned was a 2.0 Accord. The fan thermo switch failed. On a C900 this is a ~£4 part. For the Accord it was £56!!!

So tell us about your headlamp.

Oh yeah wats his name that mumbling but great actor: Dennis Weaver. And what a useles spineless car he drove. Ask to do something over

50 and it spluttered all over the place. Are all US repmobiles like that?

Laura,

Not to appear to be cynical, but what's the possibility that your auto body "friend" made up a story about the high costs of Mazda body parts so that he could do the work for you "at cost", you know... since you are friends and all? Did you happen to get any other estimates that you could compare to? Just wondering. ...yes, I know. I *am* cynical.

-Fred W

Nope. Not that kind of friend. I had to fight to get him to accept money for the parts and paid him in cash because I knew if I gave him a check he would never cash it.

snipped-for-privacy@madmousergraphics.com

design, print design, photography

Back on thread...

I don't know that it varies all that much by manufacturer in the USA. A knock sensor for my Nissan was $163. Coils on plugs are $75 each. Rotors are $80. These are retail, non mail order prices.

I know for a fact that a lot of this price is markup. Standard retail markup is 100% on parts. Saab sells a DI cassette for $400. eeuroparts has Saab units for $239 shipped. You do the math.

"Grunff" wrote in news:c4gqgn$2j63nn$ snipped-for-privacy@ID-152899.news.uni-berlin.de...

Here in Sweden it seems that Saab are selling the unique spare parts about a factor of 20 times the manufacturing cost. I replaced the ACC on a 9000 a couple of years ago, 9000 SEK (divide by 9 and get the USD rate in those days) just for the part. Tried to buy a new rear central locking motor, was

1000 SEK at at Saab and 300 SEK at the local scrappy. This is really low quality stuff and you can get for instance a much higher quality radio model servo for about 150 SEK in a hobby shop (including in addition to the electric motor some servo electronics).

There was also some spare electronic device that was charged 25000 SEK for a short while until Saab discovered that they applied the 20-factor on the manufacturing cost of the prototype.

However on spare parts where there is higher volume and competition from other dealers, like air/oil filters, spark plugs etc. Saab are only 50% more expensive than the competition.

For the 9-5 the situation seems to be the same and since the quality of that model seems to be inferior to older models the cost for the owner is consequently rather high. A few examples: Front/rear wiper handle with interval timer adjustment: 700 SEK, headlight wiper motor: 2000 SEK;

-- th

TH:

How much is a DI Cassette ... and can you convert it to US dollars ? I'm curious.

Just checked. 2300 SEK or about 300 USD at today's exchange rate. Note that all Swedish prices include 25% VAT but I guess the VAT level does not affect the pricing in different countries, it's more what the seller believe the buyer can afford.

That's pretty good. Dealers here are $400 USD. You can buy from an on-line company (eeuroparts.com) for $239. But, only a few of us know that :-)

Hmm, I just paid around 185 pounds (570 Australian) for a service that included filters, oil, coolant, and various "checks" and lovely black tyre-walls. I'm now looking for some reference material on the 97 V6 so I can slow the haemorraghing(?) of hard-earned. I gain courage from listening to the group's own windmill-jousts. Hang tough, we'll beat them in the end.

The equivalent of the AA here in Australia went out of its way in the test reports it did on the (then) new crop of Mazdas, saying that the cost of repairs was significantly higher than one would otherwise expect. Panel beaters confirmed this in personal conversations shortly afterwards.