Grove Ave. BP

If you’ve followed along, you know I drive a geezer car. Yellowbird (my Ford Escape, which is — wait for it — yellow) now has 210K miles on her, but since I’m a «drive it ’til the wheels fall off» kinda grrl, I do what it takes to keep her on the road, with her wheels firmly attached.
I made the mistake of going for an annual inspection to [redacted], a franchise operation that’s fine for some things, but JAYZUS do they build that check when presented with an opportunity to do so. [Redacted] rang up a $ 700 estimate for Yellowbird to pass inspection, for stuff that I knew I could resolve for no more than half that.
So I took the «L» on the windshield — you know the one, the sticker that tells the world your car is an abject failure — and asked a geezer-​car colleague for a recommendation to a trustworthy shop that kept geezers (and their cars) rolling. He sent me to Grove Ave. was-​Exxon-​now-​BP, where Yellowbird was brought up to code for less than half the $ 700 I was quoted by [redacted].
A few months later, Yellowbird was exhibiting some truly alarming symptoms, and I was worried that the wheels — or at least the engine — were about to fall off. I hied myself to GABP on a Friday morning in early December, and kept my fingers crossed as the diagnostic was completed. I had budgeted a figure that, based on my research and troubleshooting, took all the symptoms into account, along with a likely solution (runs rough intermittently, particularly in the rain, meaning ignition coils and O2 sensors). The quoted price for the necessary work matched that figure … and then came in $ 150 less when the work was completed.
This is not a fancy shop, but they have a waiting room with a table (where a person can fire up her Macbook and connect to the Xfinity cloud), and are only a couple blocks from the head of Carytown, with SBUX and Ellwood’s ready to let a person settle in for a stretch while waiting for car repairs to be completed. If you get your car here by 7am, you have a better than even chance of getting it back the same day.
I’ve praised other auto repair shops here on Unilocal,but each of them managed to let me down later in some way, either due to personnel changes or unwillingness to work on geezer cars without jacking the bill. I have a new go-​to in Grove Ave. BP. Stay tuned for updates.