WASHINGTON — Vehicle damage from potholes can add up. Whether a pothole blows a tire or damages a car’s suspension, the repair work isn’t cheap.
“You’re looking at something that can cause anywhere from $120 to $2,500 in damage,” says Danny Tomasian, manager of River Road Auto Service, in Bethesda, Maryland.
Damage can range from a blown tire to a bent rim to serious problems involving the suspension system.
“In today’s cars you have tires that are $150 apiece because they’re a low-profile tire. Rims also are expensive — they’re usually an alloy. They’re not just a steel wheel anymore. Every rim is custom to the car, so that increases your expense,” says Anthony George, a mechanic at Westbard Citgo, in Bethesda.
“You could end up replacing the entire suspension on one side of the vehicle.”
Any time a vehicle has suspension work, it will also require a realignment, which George calls “an added cost.”
Service stations are super-busy handling all the business drummed up by pothole-damaged vehicles.
“[When] it looks like the surface of the moon, then you know it’s kind of bad,” says Tomasian — “bent rims, jarred alignments, suspension damage.”
Mechanics say vehicle damage can be limited by rolling slowly over potholes, but too often motorists are driving distracted.
“You’re paying too much attention to everything else — your iPod, your phone, your radio — you’re not paying attention to the road in front of you and there’s an enormous pothole the size of a Civic, and you don’t even see it,” George says.
The mechanics say they expect that, as pothole repair crews fan out across area roadways in the days ahead, vehicle damage will subside.
