Citroen C4 Servicing & Parts - £1000+

Thunderbird_2

Hi

First of all, pay for the servicing and collect your car, even if it is an MOT failure on the brakes ( I understand you still have few days left in the 3 yrs)

Take the car to kiwk fit or the like for a free brake check, but do not mention anything to them about what the dealer says.

If they confirm it, take the car back home, then ring another dealer and ask to be put through to the parts department. Ask how much are the pads and discs. You can get a list of dealers close to you from Citroen website. Then ask to be put through to the service department. Ask them how many hours does it take to replace them. Then ask them what is the total package price.

Then ask if somebody knows a relaible local independant garage. If non, go to the yellow pages. Ring French cars specialists and ask them how many hours does it take to replace the pads and the discs and how much labour do they charge for replacing them.

You need to do some leg work as there is no easy way to money savings here, you see.

Good luck

P.S. I apologise if I came across patronising, I didn't mean to. :A

Jvic28

Thunderbird wrote: »

Take the car to kiwk fit or the like for a free brake check,

Do not take it to Kwik Fit. They are renound for trying to sell items that do not need replacing.

Trust your garage but ask them to show you the parts that need replacing and explain the wear to you etc. Any decent dealership would have no problem doing that. You can even ask to keep the old parts and get them checked elsewhere. Make sure you get a full quote, inclusive of VAT before they start work though, then call round other dealers/garages asking for quotes to see if your getting a sound deal.

x

Thunderbird_2

By the way, OP, 3 yrs and pads and discs need to be replaced seems a bit short to me on a new car, how many miles do you do per year? Is the car automatic?

goldspanners

Thunderbird wrote: »

By the way, OP, 3 yrs and pads and discs need to be replaced seems a bit short to me on a new car, how many miles do you do per year? Is the car automatic?

i changed pads and discs (these were definatly needed) and shoes (didnt really need these though) at 3 years on my focus.

op, as others have said collect the car from the service,tell the dealer you can get it done elsewhere for much cheaper,find a local independant to do the work.

Thunderbird_2

goldspanners wrote: »

i changed pads and discs (these were definatly needed) and shoes (didnt really need these though) at 3 years on my focus.

I must be very lucky then, because I have not changed these on the Puma yet even though she is going to be 7 years old soon.The only thing regarding the brakes that needed changing was the front brake pads 6000 miles ago. I have had the car for 4 years now. Could it have been changed before we bought it at the third year, I have no idea!

Conor_3

Brake discs and pads are around 1.5hrs to replace BOTH the fronts and the same for the rears so it should be no more than 3 hours labour in total for the lot. Sadly, main dealer pads and discs aren't cheap. You'd be better going to a local quick fit type place who can do that.

AMO

Hi all,

Thanks for all the good advice!

Really appreciated.

Rang around and got some quotes and used that to negotiate with the Citroen Dealer.

Originally, they were going to give me 10% off Parts and £10/hr off Labour, but after negotiation, they also gave me 10% off my 60K servicing and 10% off my air-conditioning servicing and a further discount on labour. This still came to over £800, but I got them to round it down to £800.

I then got further quotes from Citroen garages, and something didn't quite sound right - not sure if anyone here can make sense of this.

Originally, my garage charged:
- £310 for front brakes and discs replaced.
- £380 for rear brakes and discs replaced.

I got quotes from other Citroen garages:
- £310 for front brakes and discs replaced.
- £280 for rear brakes and discs replaced.

Notice the £100 difference in rear brakes and discs.

I queried this with the garages and their explanation was that the front pads/discs are larger and therefore the rear brakes are cheaper.

I then queried this with my Citroen dealer and they said that the rear pads/discs are more expensive because they have hubs on them. Not sure what that means though.

Nevertheless, I asked them to check this out with the parts department, because there is a huge difference in cost to the rear pads/discs.

Also, I was glad I decided to book in my car for its 60K service a little earlier so that problems arising could be fixed under warranty. They told me the following problems would be fixed:
- Rear shock absorbers
- Oil offside front disc seal
Again, this means nothing to me.

When putting my car in for servicing I said that there seemed to be a problem with the car recently where when it was cold, acceleration did not appear to be so smooth, it would accelerate slowly and then leap forward a bit. But they found the above problems - not sure if they're related though, but Citroen believe so.

Anyway, at the moment, the costs are going into the more acceptable range, so I am getting happier! :j

I have to say that I agree that I've never been in a position where someone's told me that all brake pads and all discs have worn out 90% plus and have to be changed at the same time though.

Thanks,

AMO

ArsenalFC

You could still save much more money if you use an indie to service and replace those parts, assuming they needed to be replace. Dealer i hear often use the 90% worn on pads and disc a lot, so I wouldn't totally trust them.

Service from an indie would cost u about <£150. Air con regass £45 kwik fit. All discs and pads about £250-300 for parts and labour inc. If you do your research and take up many good advise on here then u will save alot more. U dont need genuine citroen parts, after market parts are just as good as mentioned by a few people.

Hintza

ArsenalFC wrote: »

You could still save much more money if you use an indie to service and replace those parts, assuming they needed to be replace. Dealer i hear often use the 90% worn on pads and disc a lot, so I wouldn't totally trust them.

Service from an indie would cost u about <£150. Air con regass £45 kwik fit. All discs and pads about £250-300 for parts and labour inc. If you do your research and take up many good advise on here then u will save alot more. U dont need genuine citroen parts, after market parts are just as good as mentioned by a few people.

Absolutely.

But I think for most folk the perceived benefits of having a main dealer service whilst still within warranty outweigh the costs.

I would probably be having it serviced at the dealer and the OP appears to be getting a bit of warranty work done. Brakes I would probably get done elswhere.

I would however (if I was the OP) be making this my last trip to main dealer and potentially just be doing oil and filter services from now on via local garage.

(Please bear in mind that most cars we drive are normally flogged to death and are worth next to nothing after we have finished with them)

AMO

Thanks all for the advice. Before I got the Citreon I did have a local garage that I used and also since my girlfriend sourced her car through another garage I can definately make use of them.

As Hintza said though, whilst my car is under warranty, I prefer to take it to a local Citroen garage. The main reason in the past is that if I wanted to sell on the car, people would look at whether the car had been serviced at an official dealer as they don't know the local dealers.

Also this time, I wanted to do it because its the last time its under warranty. The air-conditioning should be done once every 3 years or so, so I wanted to do it incase they found a fault with it and it would be under warranty.

I was even thinking of upgrading the service.

But if I had got things done elsewhere and they came across problems that were in warranty, it would have been harder and more costlier to sort out if I needed to go back to a Citroen dealer.

The way I try to look at it at the moment is that I was committed to doing the 60K service and air-con service and MOT at Citroen so that any faults found were under warranty. Had no other problems arisin, I wouldn't have been able to negotiate much discount and so the price is what it is.

Having £600+ worth of problems, I was able to negotiate discounts on everything. Whilst some of the benefit came from reducing the price of the services etc, if I moved that benefit to reducing the cost of the brake pads/disc changes, the figures now don't look too bad.

Certainly, for future services and part changes I would be considering my local garage now that its out of warranty and the value of my car is less than a third of its new value.

Thanks for all the advice. I'll keep everyone informed as to whether I have been able to get a further discount tomorrow!

Thanx

AMO