You need to find a new mechanic if it is taking them an entire day to replace tires or do an oil change.

Or just do it yourself. At least oil changes can be done entirely oneself with a very small number of non-specialized tools. You don't even need a house with a garage, you can do it in your driveway or even on the street if you only have street parking.

As others have pointed out, tires are somewhat more complicated, but not entirely out of the realm of the home shade tree mechanic, if you're willing to invest in a few specialized tools/fixtures.

Unfortunately, there are some apartment complexes, HOAs, and city ordinances that prohibit people from working on their cars, which means either needing to find a legal place to do your own repairs or paying a mechanic. I’ve lived in apartments my entire adult life thus far, and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds. I have no choice but to either find a friend with a garage (not easy in the Bay Area when most of my friends can’t afford garages) or taking my car to a mechanic and paying Bay Area labor costs.

Those rules are usually intended to prevent people from having a derelict car up on blocks "under repairs" for weeks or months at a time. No one will notice or care if you do a quick oil change.

>legal place

You know you can just break the rules when it comes to petty stuff like that, right? If you're not being unreasonable or thumbing your nose at them they typically don't come after you.

>and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds.

This is a direct result of the clean water act and knock on laws.

The clean water act mandates stormwater management. The solution needs to be maintained in perpetuity. The HOA is the entity saddled with this. There's various engineering calculations that go into pollutant load which impacts the size of the stormwater bullshit engineered ponds you need. In order to make the solution they are forced to build cheaper, the developer puts "no wrenching" (and a bunch of other things) in the initial HOA covenant.

The city ordinances are mostly the same. They're putting that shit in their so that the engineering numbers are better and their stormwater stuff can be cheaper.

That's not to say the snooty jerks don't like those rules for their own sake.

Locally to me, it’s pretty uncommon for any mechanics, tire shops, etc. to give any sort of timeline for any sort of service.

I recently had a 1-hour job done on my car - the only appointment my local mechanic takes is for a specific date - you drop off first thing in the morning, and they call you when they’re done.

I also just called my local tire shop to enquire about mounting/balancing (but not installing) tires - they don’t take appointments for that, but also don’t guarantee any particular speed of service - you drop off your tires, and they call you when they’re done, whether it’s that day or the next.

It's not that it takes all day to do the work. It's that you get to your "appointment" and they really haven't set aside any time for you. You're just put in line like the next walk up guy.

This is my favorite thing about getting an EV; effectively zero maintenance except for tires.

I keep seeing this argument but I think about whats broken in my ice over the years: brakes, control arms, struts, suspension springs. You get a pass on gearbox but as a genuine question, do these usual mechanical problems that have nothing to do with the engine jist not happen on EVs?

Bushings and suspension parts will likely have similar (or possibly worse) wear than an IC based car due to the extra weight. Brakes a bit less possibly since you can use the regenerative braking but this also depends largely on the driver and situation.

*This is an assumption based on my experience with cars in general and doing my own repairs/maintenance not a slam on EVs.

My increasing fear is that EVs just have mechanics' eyes on them a lot less frequently, so preventative maintenance on brakes and the other mechanical parts doesn't get done. Which means, on a heavier vehicle as well, more risk of catastrophic failures during use and vehicles on the used market being junk.

A heavier vehicle also will wear tires faster, and my observation of other cars on the street is that people as a whole are very bad about not replacing tires on time.

My Model Y had to have its front control arms replaced after 4 years, it was squeaking really loud when turning. That's the only part that needed to be fixed so far, and at $250 it didn't exactly break the bank. There's the other stuff like wiper replacement and rotating/replacing tires which still have to be done. Much better than the regular $500+ annual maintenance with occasional $1000+ repair that my Honda Civic required. And that was a relatively cheap ICE to maintain.

If you look at an evs maintenance schedule it’s basically inspect stuff from time to time until 150k+ miles. Brakes don’t get changed as you almost never use them. Parts might break but not really anything maintenance wise.

I haven't done it myself but isn't a tire change suppose to be pretty easy thing to do, certainly better than sitting the whole day in the shop?

First you have to get big bulky tires delivered to wherever you're going to install them on to your wheel rims. Then you need equipment to remove the old tires from your rims, and install the new ones on the rims. Next you need to balance the tires, then you need to take care of all the TPMS components. After this you need to mount your tires. Forget something? Too bad your car is out of commission til all the above is done.

Usually it involves swapping the new tires onto the rims. It's not easy to do.

Plus balancing the new tires on those rims, and next to nobody has the gear to do that.

When I last priced the equipment it wasn't that bad costwise. In my case though it was only worth it to get rid of the whole "dealing with tire shops" issue. A close friend owns a used car dealership and they bought the mounter and balancer. IIRC...it just needed a 240v line.

I have also lost days waiting for tire shops and alignment...as those are the only 2 things I don't do myself.

A tire machine is life changing in a good way if you have a lot of cars you're responsible for. China is starting to make mid-market ones (simple pneumatic ones that are powered bug geared to home use rather than professional like the ~$1k electric machines) for ~$400ish that I'd take seriously if I was in the market

Once you have a tire machine you'll spend more time at the tire shop (outside business hours, lol) because their trash pile will be your best source for reasonably new used tires. They sell a lot of sets of 4 when 2 would do.

A $50 static balancer will do good enough for new tires in reasonable sizes.

You wanna take used half worn tires and put it on bent rims and make it come out ok, you need a digital balancer to make that not suck.

definitely not easy by yourself, but the whole process (change, then alignment etc) shouldn't take a decent mechanic's shop more than a couple of hours. I've changed tires on my nearly 200k mile car several times now, and it's usually a few days for the tires to be delivered (in america the mechanic will just receive it) and a 2h appt to get the work done. I'm shocked your parent comment mentioned waiting a whole day at the mechanics'.

My friend does this at Costco, and it takes longer purely because of appt mismanagement and backup, the work itself is quick.

It's a real bitch with spoons.

Tire machines from china are getting better and cheaper all the time, but balancers are still expensive.

The tire shop near me (America's Tire) has changed all four tires, with zero advance notice, in one hour.