Diesel repairs are more expensive than petrol ones

Low consumption, cheaper fuel,… the possible loss of diesel’s advantages over petrol and electric cars are starting to take their toll on vehicles powered by diesel engines, whose sales are falling progressively and more and more sharply in the market given the alarming threats of tax increases, fuel price rises and possible access and usage restrictions in large cities.

And as if this were not enough, a report by Autingo, an online platform for calculating quotes and booking workshop appointments, also shows that both their maintenance and their repairs are, in general, more expensive than those of petrol vehicles.

The difference between the bill for repairing or servicing a diesel vehicle and that for a petrol vehicle can be up to 280 euros. At least, that is what the analysis carried out by Autingo of the most frequent interventions on three popular models on the market shows: Citroën C4 II, Renault Scénic II and Honda CR-V III. According to the report provided by the platform, “we have been able to confirm that more than 55 percent of the interventions analysed turn out to be more expensive on a diesel”.

According to the report, the service that manufacturers specify for these models at both 60,000 km and 100,000 km is noticeably more expensive on diesel versions than on petrol versions of each model. At 60,000 km (which includes replacing the timing belt, tensioner and pulley) the differences reach up to 280 euros, and it is always more expensive on diesel versions than on petrol ones, except in the case of the Scenic II, where the owner of the petrol version will pay 38 euros more than the owner of the diesel variant. At the 100,000 km service, although prices fall significantly (almost 40 percent) — and one might ask why servicing a car at 100,000 km is cheaper than doing the same job on a car at 60,000 km — the operations carried out on diesels are always more expensive than on petrol cars, this time including the Renault.

Continuing with the study’s data, the cost of maintaining a diesel car “is usually higher because it has a more complex engine, with more components. For this reason, in most cases the intervention is more costly than on a petrol car“, says Diego Renedo, director of Autingo.

Besides the main maintenance operations, the report also analysed the prices of certain repairs that are more or less common on these three popular models. The costs of replacing the clutch kit, the front brake pads, and the water pump or alternator were studied on the three models mentioned and, as a general rule (see attached box), were almost always higher on diesel vehicles.

The smallest differences were recorded in brake pad replacement, where costs differ between the two engine types only in the case of the Renault Scénic, which shows an 8-euro price difference between its diesel and petrol versions. Only repairing the clutch kit is more expensive on the petrol Citroën C4 II than on its diesel counterpart. In all other operations and occasions, it is always more expensive to repair the fault on the diesel model than on the petrol one.

So, in addition to the difficulties that possible tax increases on diesel fuel consumption and the restrictions that municipal and regional governments may impose on diesel vehicles, especially those that are not Euro 6, diesel-powered cars have an important added handicap in the cost of their own maintenance and in that of possible fault repairs, which makes it harder to uphold their value against equivalent petrol models in order to fight the sharp drop in their sales that they have been experiencing in recent months.