2003 Honda Civic Used Car Buyers Guide

Reader Question Hello Austin,

I am looking to buying a 2003 Honda Civic and the Carfax turns up that the car hasn’t had any reported maintenance at a Honda dealership since the time of purchase.

Would you mind giving me a ballpark figure as to how much a 30k and 50k service would run me if I were to go and have them done? (I am possibly going to use this as a bargaining tool.) I tried looking on the Honda website, but it won’t give me anything but a place to log in.

Thanks!
Nina

P.s. I read what the 50k service entails on the site, is it the same for the 30k?

Thank you for all your help and you are amazing for offering all of this advice to people online!
Nina

Hello Nina,

The maintenance COULD have been performed elsewhere besides the dealership, so Carfax would not have a record of that work being performed but it could have been. The maintenance schedule prices will vary widely, even among Honda dealers in your area, call 3 dealers and you will probably get 3 different estimates.

Why? For the most part, these scheduled maintenance items are fully of “inspections” rather than “replace this, replace that” items, so you are going to pay the dealership to inspect and look at components of your vehicle THEN when they find something that needs to be replaced, you will be charged extra.

Some people are hard on brake pads, and at 30K you might need a brake job, where as some people who do mostly highway driving may not need a brake job until 50K. So, the prices of these maintenance items can vary widely depending on the driving habits of the driver.

If you just want a ball park figure to use as a bargaining tool, I would use $300 for the 30K and $500 for the 50K. I would also get on the Internet and start looking at www.ebay.com and www.autotrader.com and find similar cars with similar mileage and features so you can compare prices.

Here is a pretty nice used car check list you might want to print out and fill out as much of the info as you can yourself.

Used Car Buying Guide

You also might find this article I wrote helpful

Toyota Maintenance Schedule

And here is my 30K maintenance schedule

30,000 Mile Maintenance Schedule

Blessings,

Austin Davis