If you have gone through 3 sets of disk brake pads, then your rear brake shoes probably
are shot...and I'm not surprised that the drums may be trashed as well. So my guess is these guys
probably aren't lying to you.
You could always drive slowly (10-15mph) in a parking lot and then slowly pull up on the parking brake handle while keeping the brake release button depressed. This will apply the rear brakes without the fronts. Listen for any grinding then. Again...based on how many times you have replaced the front brakes
without servicing the rears, you almost certainly need new rear shoes at this point and probably drums as well.
Let's talk about parts pricing...
You
could easily spend close to $800 (list price) if you called a local Mitsubishi dealer and said "I need 2 new brake drums and brake shoes for a 2015 Mirage". Ummm...so
don't do that.
I assume that's what these guys may be doing to price this job. But even at that...I'm not sure where the rest of their estimate is coming from.
For $1300, I'll drive to your house and do the job myself. I'll even give you a $20 Mirageforum discount.
You can buy the brake drums (bare) from AutoZone or O'Reilly...but you will have to remove the wheel bearing, wheel studs and ABS ring from your old drums and install them in the new drums (not super-difficult, but not trivial either if someone is doing this in a mobile operation). See
this post to see someone actually doing it. This may be the absolute cheapest way for a DIYer to do rear brakes on a Mirage...but a hired gun mechanic coming to your driveway won't want to deal with all of that crap.
The easiest thing to do is to buy a set of
complete brake drum assemblies...that include the drum, wheel bearing, wheel studs and ABS ring
already installed. You can just take these out of the box and throw them on the car. At this point it looks like RockAuto.com is the only place to get drums like this...
At least one person (
this guy) has purchased these complete drums from RockAuto and installed them...and he said they worked fine. Unfortunately he never told us exactly which part number he ordered from RockAuto. It's one of the 2 Centric drums pictured above.
Be careful... AutoZone will show you pictures of a complete Mirage drum assembly on their website...but when you get it, it's a
bare drum with nothing included. More info on that
here.
HERE are Raybestos brake shoes that will fit on your Mirage. You should be able to find these at almost any local parts store for less than $40.
So just figure out where to buy the drums or tell the mobile mechanic guy where to get this stuff from. Or better yet, just show him this thread.