He elected to replace all coils and plugs. I did have a cylinder 1 coil failure on the car the year before, but after a bit a research, I decided to only replace the 1 coil, leaving the other 5 as-is. I’m just not the type of guy who likes to proactively repace items in case they fail, but after reading and asking around, perhaps I should have based on the fact he had another failure of a different coil. His mechanic charged him $600 to replace cylinder coil 4 and spark plug 4, but the actual issue turned out to be coil 5, so they did both. The coil is very easy to replace, actually, requiring zero tools once you take the plastic cover off. So it seems that coils on this car are huge profit items for shops. I was quoted $900 by Pep Boys to repace all 6 coils and plugs. Probably would have taken me 45 mins to 60 mins to do the work myself.

It was for a BMW X3, not a 996. I’ve never had anything other than diagnostics done at Pep Boys. They used to do free diagnostics but have raised prices over the years for even a simple diag.