The plastic cover to the radar cruise control sensor popped off on road. Bought unpainted 2x2 plastic cover piece at dealership for $11. To paint it brilliant pearl, they want to charge me $50. No thanks. Right now, I have one white and one black cover on the front grill of my car. I will just get another unpainted one and have two black covers.
I'm guessing you've never had car parts painted before. I posted how much it cost to do some work on my former 350Z's bumper cover and repaint it at High milage fully loaded or Low milage Stadard? | Page 2 | PriusChat. This was NOT at a dealer and was what an insurance estimator estimated. I called a local body shop that someone recommended and they said they were willing to do it for that price.
That's what the business calls a "nuisance" job. The $50 they quouted is actually less than what it cost them to do it. Preparing the part, mixing the paint, allowing it to dry, and then the paperwork costs them a lot more. They're glad that you didn't take them up on the offer, actually.
OK, maybe I'm just dense, but why isn't this covered under the warranty? Stuff just shouldn't "pop off" of the front of a brand new vehicle unless you drove it off road or bumped into something.
I don't know the logistics of it all but it would be nice if Toyota would batch paint all of the small parts for their cars. Ridiculous I know but if done in batches, it would cost pennies on the dollar vs. a customer paying for it later down the road.
Yeah, the soaring costs of paper are just unreal Joking aside, what *might* be true is opportunity cost, meaning the labor involved is not doing something else more profitable, like spending 45 seconds popping in an air filter for $25. I find no reason to whine about dealer charges, because I STAY AWAY.
I would not necessarily call it "whining". If one is content to take unfair treatment, that is all one will get. However, I simply decided to order another unpainted black cover to match and it looks fine as it is.
There could be color matching issues. I've toured numerous auto factories before including Toyota's Tsutsumi plant. They (and IIRC, every auto plant I've visited) paint the entire body of the car and then remove the doors to make it easier to install parts/work on the inside of the car. Once they're mostly done w/that, they put the doors back on and IIRC, they match the doors specifically w/the body. I think it wouldn't be good enough to just go by the same color, as there could be subtle color mismatches. However, there's is another possible reason for this. At Toyota and Mazda (when I toured them), they were building LHD and RHD vehicles and multiple models on the same line. There wasn't necessarily a row of a bunch of the same model or ones w/the steering wheel on a particular side.
Yes, painting them would cost pennies. But the shipping, distribution, storage, and inventory control and tracking of the extra SKUs would still cost many dollars.
