a friend has a smart car that she loves.
she far its already cost her 300 quid this week, and the garage ow tells her that its going to cost £1000 to fit a new clutch actuator.
dont know anything about smarts but this seems a lot.

anyone know anything about smarts?

or know of a garage near edinburgh thats trsutworthy?

the bill is so much she doesnt know if she can afford to keep the car

cheers

Paul

Can't help with that, and I take it the actuator is something to do with automatic transmission. However I've always seen it this way:

What's the car worth, is there anything else likely to break soon and factor that into the current repair.

E.g. If the car's worth 2k, and it's otherwise mint might well be worth doing
However if the car's worth 2k, and after that it's going to need xyz costing £££ then maybe not.

yeh i asked her about that last night.
but what she said was that this is a 5k car, and each year sher has owned it its cost about £1k to keep on the road.
its not that its an uneconomical repair in this instance just that its too expensive to be parting with that kind of cash every year.

this does seem to be a good deal of misdiagnosis of gearbox problems reported on the net too, so maybe she has suffered from that as well.

Paul

Is this from an approved smart car dealer or just an ordinary garage?

I looked at getting one of the roadsters which I like the style off but after checking on forums they were many many many reliability issues with smart cars so I soon went off that idea. Infact you'll find very few cars with such bad owner reviews.

At this rate smart will vanish off the road in a few years. Depreciation is colossal.


[Edited on 13/4/11 by Mr Whippy]

mercedes garage.

so no wonder its expensive i guess.

perhaps this will help? -

linky

looks a £50 part tbh but as it says may just need a bit of a clean inside

[Edited on 13/4/11 by Mr Whippy]

My god, £1000 to clean a cast alloy part lol

Report the garage and give them a bad name.

[Edited on 13/4/11 by Moorron]

yeah even if it was to replace the actuator with a new one it's still only two bolts and a cable to do. These dealer services are no better than no good con artists praying on the vulnerable.