Mondeo Dealer Servicing

[Katoomba]

My Mondeo had its 3000km "Peace of Mind" service (who thought that name up? :togo: ) today.

The service rep told me the routine A services will cost $260-00 plus parts which seems a heck of lot for the one and 1/4 hours quoted in the service book.

And it looks even more expensive following Toyota's announcement of fixed price services ($120-00) on all new Camry routine 15000Km intervals (same intervals as the Mondeo).

Looks like I will be continuing with Kmart who have done really excellent and reasonably-priced servicing and repairs for the last eight years on my 2000 Laser.

In forty three years of new car buying, I'm yet to find a dealer who offered decent quality and priced servicing and that includes Ford, Holden, Jaguar, Range Rover, Toyota, Triumph, MG & Volvo. I'm not hard to please but I always come away from dealer servicing feeling ripped off.

And I won't get into getting warranty work done ... :

[scribbly]

...and here was little old me thinking the first service was free and part of the warranty.

[TheColonel]

The 3000km service is free and is basically a check over of the car to make sure all is safe and sound, no actual work is done, no oil change or anything is done til the first A service at 15,000km or when ever it is for you oil burners out there

[Katoomba]

Originally Posted by scribbly

...and here was little old me thinking the first service was free and part of the warranty.

My apologies if I created that misunderstanding. The 3000km checkup, as The Colonel has said above, is free. The price I mentioned is for the regular 15,000km A service.

[monkeyboy666]

My TDCi had its 15,000 service today - $264 inclusive, but they didn't wash it... Ultratune used to wash my old Magna sometimes (and they always blacked the tyres!)

[Katoomba]

(Just deleted what I wrote here as it repeated most of what I said above which I had forgotten about.)

[LRsedan]

Euro Fords cost a lot more to service as well, its part of the deal.

My old focus used to cost $260 to service as well.

Just wait till you need brakes, your going to top yourself. My focus had just the front brakes done at 40 000kms. Rotors and pads needed changing (Euro ford wear the pad and rotor evenly for better braking performance), just for rotors and pads including install was $700.

Obviously non-genuine parts would be cheaper...

Luckily I got the dealership to spring for 1/2 the cost as I just bought the car with 35K kms and I convinced them they should have replaced the rotors and pads before the car was sold to me...

[Katoomba]

My service manual says the standard 15k service should take 1 1/4 hours. $260 sounds like an awful lot of money for that especially as I said above that the Camry has a fixed price of $120 for the similar service.

My cars will continue to be serviced at Kmart. Dealer servicing is a ripoff - what they discount on the sale, they make up afterwards on the servicing. A schoolfriend owns one of the largest new car dealerships in Australia and use to laugh at people who got dealer servicing.

Check out the latest edition of Choice for their recent survey of dealer servicing which should give you some thought on how to spend your car dollars.

[monkeyboy666]

The dealer I had my service done at was one of those listed in the Choice article, they were the one that missed replacing the blown reversing light globe. So I figured that after all that publicity at least they'd do an extra special careful job on services, and take double care to check everything - at least for the next few weeks anyhow!

[Dusty1]

Does anyone with a lease know if you have to take the car to a Ford dealer to get it serviced? I can't remember seeing anything about this in the lease. I'm a bit unsure about taking a diesel car to anyone except those who are Ford dealers, or a place that deals mainly in servicing European cars.