One thing that buyers of used exotic rides tend to forget is that, in the eyes of dealers, a car priced $100,000 a decade or two ago, remains a $100,000 car when it comes to maintenance costs, regardless of depreciation.
The solution? If you go the aftermarket way, both in regards to parts and labor, most of the times, you can save yourself some serious money, but what happens when you’re forced by circumstances to go with an official dealer using original parts? Well, it really depends on the car and the kind of maintenance or repair work done to your vehicle, but usually, be prepared to pay.
Enter Rob Ferretti from Super Speeders, who owns a 2004 NSX and says he had to change the clutch at an Acura dealer.
“I know I could have gone with an aftermarket clutch, but I was running into the difficulty of putting an aftermarket clutch, dealing with the dealer who had already got the car, moving it from there, finding someone else to work on the NSX – it just didn’t make any sense,” he explained.
How much did Ferretti pay for the clutch job? Close to $5,000, of which most was for parts, with the flywheel alone costing nearly $2,800.
“I’ve got clutches for my other cars that are superfast and I’m okay with them costing $2,500 because they hold 800 or 1,000 horsepower,” he says in the video. “This car has the same horsepower as a Honda Accord, so it doesn’t require a fancy clutch and flywheel. The factory clutch job for – I think it’s 290hp – was almost $5,000 and that’s mostly parts, not so much labor. Why does that bother me so much? Because a 290hp car does not require a $4,000 clutch, of which most of it was the cost of the flywheel at almost $2,800, which is mind-boggling to me!”
Had he bought the original factory flywheel from an outside shop, he could have saved $500 or more on that part alone, while going the aftermarket route, the savings could have been nearly $2,000 on the same part, according to a quick internet search.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject – not necessarily limited to the NSX, but generally speaking.