Recently, our partners over at TheCarConnection.com posted an article on the Best and Worst cities for auto-repair gouging. It seems like in today’s society auto repairs would be becoming more standardized since every new car requires being hooked up to some electronic device to diagnosis it. However, the AutoMD study found that this isn’t true, repairs across the U.S. vary significantly.

The benchmark repair used for the study was replacing the front brake pads on a Ford Focus. As you might imagine, the parts are easy to come by and the repair should be straightforward. The results of the study found that the repair prices nationally varied by some $485 with some shops in the same area costing three to four times more than that of others. What is even more distressing, especially for car owners who don’t know much about cars in general, is that more than half of the shops polled didn’t stand by their original quote.

The five best cities include, Memphis, Jacksonville, Omaha, San Antonio, and Austin. The five worst cities were cited as being Chicago, Honolulu, Albuquerque, Washington D.C., and Raleigh. Needless to say if you live in any of the five worst cities, you might need to shop around for the best deal or find a good mechanic friend.

Check out the full details over at TheCarConnection.com and take a look at the entire list with prices and percentages for all 50 cities that were a part of the study.