As regular reader will know, I’m always on the lookout for ridiculously overpriced car spares. This week’s award goes to Nissan, and their price for a pair of replacement exterior mirrors for a Cabstar truck. As a comparison, an electric / heated mirror for a Vauxhall Vectra costs around £120, which is pretty expensive (I just paid the same for a Sony portable DVD player with 8″ Widescreen) but not too extortionate. So, for a bigger, but far less sophisticated mirror for the Nissan, surely £300 + VAT is a bit of a joke. Apparently not, as the straight-faced parts delivery driver took my cheque for £600!

You know that feeling you get when you’ve been totally ripped-off? Well, that’s how I felt, and they weren’t even for me! So, next time you clip your mirror on something and it smashes into several pieces, make sure you’re sitting comfortably when you phone for a price.

One way you can save a few quid on parts like these is to check eBay. We recently had a customer with a Jeep Grand Cherokee that needed a pair of mirrors, and our (now bankrupt) local Chrysler dealer wanted over £500 for the pair. A quick scan through eBay found a pair in perfect working order from a similar Jeep and the seller wanted just £150 for the pair, including postage. They were even the same colour and once fitted, were as good as new at a 1/3 of the cost.

I’ve become such a regular user of eBay for parts now, that I often look there first before phoning our usual suppliers. I find it best for expensive parts that are fairly common failures, such as alternators and starter motors for Japanese vehicles. A replacement alternator for a Mitsubishi Shogun is a very costly item from Mitsubishi (almost £500) and is around £250 for a motor factor. There’s a number of suppliers on eBay selling identical parts for £140.00 which include VAT and postage. By using these suppliers, we can save our customers a lot of money and can often do the whole job, including labour, for less than the parts alone would’ve cost! They usually have the same 12 month warranty, and are usually delivered the next day by courier.

I’m even a regular buyer of good secondhand engines from damaged cars, that enable us to give a new lease of life to a customer’s car that might otherwise be consigned to the scrapyard. The engines are usually delivered on a big pallet, covered in clingfilm and with various pipes and wires ’severed’ by a butcher with a cutting torch! Geneally speaking, although it’s a bit of a gamble buying a secondhand engine without seeing it run first, the seller’s desire to not receive negative feedback usually means they’re only selling an engine they know is good.

If you’re trying to keep an older car going on a limited budget, eBay really is the only way to find that little part that costs a fortune from the main dealer and would mean that the car would otherwise be uneconomic to repair. Something like a replacement engine ECU that causes the car to not even start, might cost upwards of £500 from a dealer, yet can often be found on eBay for as little as £20 for a working secondhand part that’ll get your pride and joy back on the road again (until the next thing breaks!)

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