We see customer cars an average of three times per year for regular maintenance and repairs. From the car you just drove off Kendall’s lot to the 200K-miles, loved-up commuter your high schooler is now driving, we have a lot of data points to reference when it comes to vehicle conditions in the North Star Borough.
In short, we know how long vehicles tend to remain useful, how much it costs to own them, and what drivers can expect to pay in repairs per year.
We want to draw attention to a trend we are seeing in automotive repair and maintenance. A trend that is costing Fairbanksans an increasingly larger percentage of their expendable income over the course of the past decade.
Listen to the video in this post: This is the sound of an air hammer used in combination with drills in order to extract seized bolts from a control arm. Bolts that normally unfasten, by design, easily like a bowline knot, now take hours to literally un-weld due to rust.
This repair is a standard maintenance procedure for vehicles—one that should not break the bank. The labor cost of this repair was increased by 200 percent due to rust alone.
The introduction of salt on Fairbanks roadways has costs that are not hidden. They appear boldly now in our customer’s budgets. It is time to research and publish the increased cost to Borough residents in using salt as a way to manage conditions. There are alternatives.