Should You Pay $320 or More for a Dealer Oil Change?

It’s inexpensive and easy to perform your own Mercedes oil-change, but is it always smart? Tavarish opens the hood to find out.

Online automotive personality Tavarish has been having fun in a fairly cheap and powerful Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG recently. You may be familiar with our covering his SL55 AMG exploits, but now he’s posted a video walking you through doing your own oil change on this fine German machine. His cost? About $100 for oil and filter, plus 30 minutes of his time. The cost at a Mercedes dealer for the “Schedule A Service”? $320!

We’re big believers in saving money and doing things yourself on your cars. When you work on your car you learn the ins and outs of what it needs, and you don’t have to wonder if the junior tech remembered to tighten all the bolts late on a Friday afternoon. The dealer’s $320 price seems like a lot of money for a glorified oil change.

However, if this were the first service under our own ownership, we’d recommend taking this car to the dealer in order to have a pro perform the once-over to discover things that are about to go wrong in the next 10,000 miles.

ALSO SEE: What the Forum Has to Say About Performing Shadtree Services

Considering the oil and filter alone (if you’re without a Motul sponsorship) already cost you $100, the $220 for labor, expertise, and other fluids that need topping off and changing (like the differential, according to this chart) seems cheap.

But then if you’re a fan of Tavarish’s videos, you would’ve seen the earlier one where he actually had the dealer perform a full “buyer inspection.” They went over every inch of it. Some of what they found, like the worn-out brakes ($1,200 to replace), would be easy for you to spot in your own driveway. It’s less likely you’d spot the transmission fault codes indicating a possible $6,000 repair.

So don’t be afraid to save money and perform your own service, but do take your car to the experts occasionally for their opinions. Spending what seems like a bank vault of money on service now may save you from spending the Federal Reserve’s budget after a catastrophic failure in the future.