How to Choose Shock Absorbers

Video Transcript

"Hello, my name is Chuck Orlandi with Miami Shores Auto Repair here in Miami Shores, Florida. Okay. The question is how to choose shock absorbers for your car. That's a vague question. It depends on the type of car you have, where you use it, if you're driving off-road a lot, if you're not driving off-road, if it's a truck, you know. A lot of cars today use struts, which is not the same as a shock absorber, but it does pretty much the same job. It's a little bit more of a costly replacement. It's not as simple as a shock absorber. It's a more beefy part. It has springs, usually, built into it, and it's more labor-intensive to change it. If you know...if your car needs a shock, typically you'll have where if you hit a bump and the car rides very hard or it could be very soft -- it may bounce. It may bounce more than one time up and down, up and down. That would be a sign that you need shocks replaced. Also, if it gets...if you hit a bump and you feel nothing but a real banging, hard feeling, that would be another sign that you need shocks. I normally replace shocks with whatever the factory put on there to begin with. Same...not necessarily the same brand, but the same style, same design. I don't normally go into more beefy shock absorbers like for trucks or anything. But if you do need that, you know, that's something that, definitely, we can do. Again, costs on a shock absorber, they're not that expensive. Each shock's probably 35 to 40 dollars, plus labor. On a strut, they can be over 100 dollars real easily, plus labor."