AutoMD Ranks Best and Worst Cities for Auto Repair

AutoMD analyzed how the top-50 most populated U.S. cities stack up when it comes to providing consumers with fair auto repair cost estimates. You’ll never guess it, but in the report, Memphis ranked as the best city for fairness and consistency of prices quoted in auto repair, while Chicago ranked as the worst. I wonder under what list Chicago would be ranked number one? Maybe for the City with the Most Wind…oh burn, wait…what?!

Anyway, mystery shoppers conducted a fairness check of over 600 shops in the top-50 DMAs (including a range of dealers, independent shops, and franchises like Pep Boys) by requesting quotes on a typical auto repair job: a front brake replacement job for a Ford Focus. To measure pricing integrity, the mystery shoppers called back two weeks later with an industry standard price estimate. The best and worst list was then calculated based on each city‘s rankings for three critical factors, weighted equally:

1. Repair Affordability: The average cost-per-job for that city based on prices quoted by repair shops
2. Price Disparity Range: The percentage variance between the lowest price quoted and the highest price quoted in each market
3. Shop Integrity Factor: The percentage of shops that shifted their original quoted price by more than 5% when presented with an industry standard price estimate

To see if your city is best, worst or somewhere in-between, see AutoMD.com‘s complete Advocacy for Repair Shop Fairness Report rankings below or click here.

Pretty sure if you did this by actual repair shop and you put Sun Automotive in Eugene up there [the one on 19th & Agate] – they would rank as one of the most honest places. However, you put the garages I’ve been to in the Bay on there [no need for names] and no thanks, they will charge you 3x the amount you should be paying.

Thank you AutoMD. You’ve now informed me that next time I need an auto repair, I might as well ship it out to Memphis and have it shipped back because it will save me more money doing that then getting the repair in my area.

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