In the game of heavy-duty repairs and owning a light duty diesel truck, the daily grind or services and and cost of mechanical repairs can feel like you’re up against a wall, and we will be the first people to inform our customer base about that. First and foremost, there is no “bulletproof” truck and not one brand is a god send of engineering that will equal zero to little repair and maintenance costs over 5 years of ownership. This may be harsh for people to hear but maintaining a light duty diesel truck doesn’t come easy or cheap, and for that matter, the predictability of the future repairs is vast and not very cheap. This is compounded by the ongoing supply issues that everyone has seen across the board.

This leads us into the conversation of BASIC maintenance that for whatever reason is neglected on over half the vehicles that come in for major repairs, (IE a turbo, injectors, HP fuel pumps, transmissions, ETC). Almost guaranteed when a customer comes in for these types of repairs, we pull an air filter and its more than obvious that the thing was in the truck for 50-60, starving the truck of clean air for who knows how long, we don’t even charge labor to pop the air filter cover to replace a 40-60 dollar premium filter. Fuel filters need to be changed every 10-15k depending on the application (usually closer to 10, the newer gen diesels have better filtration and can go 15k). These services will save a customer from injectors going bad and we are happy to sell basic services on a daily basis and not large jobs.

Jobs in the recent past, 2-3 years have almost doubled in cost in some respects due to the sheer cost of the parts themselves. The average DPF has gone from 1500 dollars to over 3000 dollars, the average set of injectors has gone from 1200 to over 2000 dollars, this is just the parts guys, no labor, fluids, and God forbid we suggest replacing old gaskets and seals that have no chance of survival (those 5-20 dollars pieces of the puzzle might as well be made of gold). We continue to work with, educate and steer our customers that are here regularly and inform them of typical upcoming issues, opportunities, potential fixes, and precautionary services that can lead to lest catastrophic feeling repair bills at some point of ownership.
As always, the crew here at Left Coast Diesel in Concord, CA will always strive to put the cleanest and most honest work out there, which may be hard to understand and even afford at times, but we promise you the work is done the right way, taking the best possible path to reliability we can find.