You may have heard the advice to “get a second opinion.” This essentially means that if a mechanic gives you an especially high estimate, it’s wise to find another mechanic, ask about the same problem, and see if the estimates match up. A mechanic named David Long, who goes by the Car Wizard on YouTube, recently gave a second opinion on a Honda CR-V that saved his customer $2,200.

One of his regular customers has a daughter driving a third-generation Honda CR-V. According to Long, “She’s in her early 20s. She just heard this little bit of noise. She doesn’t want to mess up her car. She’s just curious what’s wrong.” So she took her Honda into a shop in the town where she lives.

The first shop’s estimate? Long says, “By the time they paid tax and everything, it was going to be over $2,000. $2,200 or something.” That’s after the CR-V driver paid a $134 diagnostic fee.

For $2,200, was this shop recommending a new transmission or motor swap? Nope. That estimate was for every brake component and the car’s front half shaft CV joints. These are all parts third-gen CR-Vs need eventually, so Long wasn’t too suspicious. Then his customer brought the Honda in for a second opinion. What Long found shocked and saddened him.

A second opinion on the Honda CR-V

He examined all of the brake pads. “We can see the pads are probably 50-60% remaining.” He took a look at the rotors, which supposedly needed replacement. “Again, no damage…they’re not warped.” Then he tested the half shafts for wear or looseness. “No discernible play in the CV shaft.”

So what about the noise that originally startled the driver? Long explains, “They’re usually tapered when they’re brand new, and as they wear down, you start accessing a larger area of the rotor. Now we’re into an area that has gotten a little rust on it. It’s making a little bit of noise.”

Was the noise concerning? Long assured the driver it would go away in just a few miles. “Nothing–underlined nothing–is wrong with this car.”

Long reassured the car’s young driver and sent her on her way. But he still had some feelings about how her mechanic treated her. “This is one of those situations where they’re like, ‘oh, we’ve got a young woman in here. We can really run this bill up. And she won’t even be the wiser. She doesn’t even know how a car works, that dumb woman.’ That just really pisses me off. It really pisses me off.”

The mechanic understood his competitor’s urge to make more money. But he has a different strategy. “We’re truthful and we’re honest. Because I want them to keep coming back. That’s how I get money from people. I do proper work for a proper price. They’re happy. They keep on coming back.”

He has a good point. This CR-V owner will eventually need rotors, calipers, CV shafts, and even suspension components replaced. And something tells me she won’t go back to the first shop. You can see Long’s entire walk-around of the CR-V in the video embedded below: