2002 Subaru Legacy, Engine Replacement Pawlik Automotive

http://pawlikautomotive.com (604) 327-7112

Mark: Hi it’s Mark from Top Local, we’re here with Bernie Pawlik at Pawlik Automotive in Vancouver. We're talking about a Subaru Legacy. Having some issues with Google+ this morning, Google Hangouts. It's always an adventure. How you doing Bernie?

Bernie: I'm doing pretty well. It is an adventure. Hopefully, the technology will work with us this time.

Mark: We've talked a lot about Subaru's in the past, this is a Legacy, but this time it's a engine replacement, which is a bit extreme. Is this pretty common with these motors?

Bernie: No, it's not. We do a lot of head gaskets, as we've talked about in the past. We probably do at least one or two a month, maybe even more. Head gaskets tend to leak on Subaru's, but engines themselves are very reliable. We very rarely ever replace an engine.

Mark: 2002 is getting a bit old for that level of repair. Is it worth it?

Bernie: It's really up to the owner of the vehicle. This person had just recently bought this vehicle, unfortunately, but it's in really nice shape. I'll share a photo of it. There's our 2002 Legacy. I mean, the car looks pretty much brand new, the mileage is pretty low on this vehicle, and it actually, with the exception of the issue with the engine, is actually running fine at the time. I'm going to cut the photo here, if I can remember how to do that. Am I back? Yes, I am.

Is it worth it? It's really up to the individual owner. With every car, people often attach a value, "Oh, it's only worth this much, so I'm only going to spend half of the value on repair.". People have these, in my opinion, crazy equations, but really, at the end of the day, when you own a car it's how much money you're sending out the door for the privilege or whatever it is, the cost of driving. To me, that's the only thing you really need to look at. If you buy a brand new car, you're not doing a lot of repairs, but you're spending 3, 500, 1,000 bucks a month on payments. You know, when you have an old car, you might spend 3-4,000 bucks one year changing an engine, and then you don't spend any more money. When you work that out into monthly payments, it's much lower. It's still money that's going out the door. Anyways, is it worth it? It's very much up to the owner, but this car was in good shape. We'd done an inspection previously on it, and stated that everything was actually in pretty good working order otherwise.

Mark: What was the presenting problem and what did you do to solve it?

Bernie: Basically, the vehicle came to us, he was driving down the highway and all of a sudden, it started developing a knocking noise in the engine, which is never good. Got to the shop, we started it up, you could heard something very severe in the bottom of the engine going knock, knock, knock, knock, knock. When we arranged for an engine replacement, and he authorized the job, we decided to drive the vehicle into the shop to get repairs done, and halfway through the parking lot