In the budget conscious world in which we live, after a home, a car is the most expensive item purchased by the average person. One of the most important components of how much a person will spend on a car is service. Aside from sheer reliability which is subjective at best, there are several factors that can increase or decrease the cost of keeping a car on the road.

The first factor is rarity. The more popular a vehicle is in a given area, the more likely that local service facilities will stock parts and be trained in the service of that particular make or model. An extremely common car that mechanics can service with the knowledge they already have and parts that they order wholesale is the best case scenario. For every instance that service facilities must study a new model or place a special order for an individual component, the price goes up – sometimes dramatically.

The second consideration is prestige. Is it expensive to purchase prestigious things because they are intrinsically better or are they prestigious simply because they are expensive? This is like asking which came first: the chicken or the egg. The bottom line is that prestige and price go hand in hand. We see this played out at every level of the consumer experience. You can buy a run of the mill pair of blue jeans for a very reasonable price. You can also buy a pair of designer jeans made of exactly the same materials for ten times that reasonable cost. The same thing applies to cars.

A person taking his Aston Martin for car servicing Newcastle will pay many times what a person taking his Peugeot in for car servicing in Newcastle will pay. For the same service requiring sometimes identical parts, a rule of thumb is that the more expensive the vehicle, the more service will cost.

The last factor to consider is the environmental friendliness of the car. At this moment, there is sort of a balance between older vehicles and the newest and greenest cars. The older vehicles require more personal time from a mechanic as he manually checks for problems. The newer, low emission cars require less time but specialized computer driven diagnostic tools. The cost of purchase for these tools is passed on to the customers and seems to be in a state of balance with the more time consuming older vehicles. Looking to the future, low emission cars will become a greater value as that “new” diagnostic equipment is no longer new and governments encourage green cars by increasing penalties for vehicles that pollute at an exceptional rate.

Service is a huge component of the second largest purchase made by the average person. Anyone who really wants to know how much he or she will spend on a car should investigate that car’s service costs thoroughly.