thegarageblog.co.uk : Think of a price, then double it – some truths about garage repair costs.

They say it always pays to ’shop around’ and in these days of misery and recession, the savvy consumer is haggling harder on anything and everything. Whether it’s a new sofa or a plasma TV, there’s deals to be had everywhere as retailers fight to squeeze any spare money out of you in the hope that Britain will spend its way out of recession. Whilst it’s a great feeling to bring home a huge cardboard box containing the latest Sony or Panasonic 52″ HD TV, the joy is usually fairly short-lived once the credit card statement pops through the letterbox. When it comes to parting with your hard-earned money in a giant electrical store such as Comet or Currys, it’s normally a fairly straightforward process. The televisions (or other appliances) are neatly lined up with big price tags on. Yes, you can have a 32″ LCD from a cheap brand for £199, right up to a 60″ to brand Plasma display for £4000 but the prices are all clearly marked and you know what you’ll be getting. With ‘goods’ it’s pretty easy, but ’services’ are another matter entirely. What you might think you’ll pay isn’t always what you’ll end-up paying!Nowhere is this more true than in the world of car repairs and servicing. OK, so a straightforward annual service is pretty easy to price-up and at any reputable garage, when you come to collect your car, provided they haven’t done anything you weren’t expecting, you shouldn’t have any nasty surprises when it comes to settling the bill.

Other jobs such as replacing a clutch or changing a cylinder head gasket can be a lot harder to price accurately, or can also spell further expenditure once the relevant bit of car is ‘opened up’ to assess what’s wrong. It’s at times like these when things can sometimes get a bit out of hand!

In an ideal world, every repair job on every car would be very simple. The price would be calculated using the following formula:

Standard labour time (hours) X hourly labour rate + retail cost of part PLUS VAT on the total.

So, say for a 2002 Peugeot 206 1.4 litre clutch replacement, the labour time (ICME Standard) is 3.5 hours, our labour rate is £57.00 p/h and the new clutch kit costs £69.33.

Total labour is 3.5 X 57.00 = £199.50 + £69.33 = £268.83 + VAT which is a (very reasonable!) £309.15

So, you agree the price, book the car in and we order the parts. On the day, you drop the car off and and the technician drives it onto the ramp and starts removing the wheels, driveshafts, battery, starter motor, exhaust brackets, lower suspension arms and engine mountings. He’ll then undo all the gearbox securing bolts and then, with the help of an assistant, he’ll separate the gearbox from the engine and lower it to the floor, leaving the clutch nice and easy to get to so he can change it. Off with the knackered clutch cover plate, friction plate and release bearing and give the flywheel a good clean before bolting on the new clutch bits, ready to refit the gearbox etc. Assuming the technician is in a good mood, none of the bolts were siezed, he could find all his tools and he hadn’t had an argument with his girlfriend that morning or had a hangover, he’ll be working to the correct speed and within the 3.5 hours, your car will be back on the road and ready to go. Everybody’s happy; the customer because their car is fixed within the timescale and price quoted, the technician as his ramp is now free to get the next job in and I’m happy because I might have made a reasonable profit on the job to pay my overheads.

Now, the next day we’ve got another similar job in the workshop. Should take the same time, but as he did one yesterday, he might even be a bit quicker as he remembers in what order to take everything off and put it back. The parts are here, car’s on the ramp and we’re ready to go. This time, despite starting the job at 9am, it’s still on the ramp and unfinished at 4pm. That’s over 7 hours on the ramp, but we’ve only quoted for 3.5, so what went wrong?

Well, for a start a couple of the engine mounting bolts wouldn’t come out – they were rusted in and properly siezed. That took him nearly an hour extra of brute force, WD40 spray and swearing to get them shifted! Then, once over that hurdle, on opening the box of the new clutch kit, he finds that the motor factors have sent the wrong one. The car’s now stuck on the ramp unmovable, minus its gearbox and most suspension bits whilst we wait for the right part to be delivered. Come lunchtime, the technician disappears sharply at 1pm leaving the dead car on the ramp until he gets back at 2. Whilst he was on lunch, he had a big argument with his girlfriend and returned in a foul mood. Despite the right clutch kit having arrived over lunch, he’s now in a sulky and uncooperative mood and works much slower, dropping spanners and moaning a lot. At 2.30, after just half an hour of work, he decides to answer a ‘call of nature’ that ends up taking 25 minutes (and 1/2 can of air freshener!) so no sign of the clutch going back on. Finally, the job of wiggling the gearbox back onto the engine is proving to be a bit of a struggle. It requires a bit of teamwork to align it properly and although when a technician is ‘on form’ it doesn’t normally take too long, a stroppy and now tired (they’re always tired after lunch) mechanic is half-heartedly trying to position the heavy gearbox which takes a lot longer. It actually takes him another hour to get the thing all bolted up and ready to go. Finally, he goes to fill the gearbox up with oil, only to find that he used the last of the SX75/90 transmission fluid yesterday, but didn’t bother to order any more (or tell anyone about it). Another half an hour of waiting and the motor factors deliver a drum of oil and finally the car is off the ramp ready for a test drive. Assuming there’s no further problems, I can now phone the customer and tell them it’s ready for collection.

As you can imagine, I can’t call the owner and say, “well, it was going to be £310.00 but Fred was having a bad day, the parts were wrong and he had to take a crap halfway through the job so it’s now £500″ as I’d soon have hoardes of angry customers and probably Trading Standards onto me!

No, I simply charge them the price that was quoted and then spend the next hour moaning at the technician about how hard it is to run a business these days! This time, only the customer is happy and it’s just me that isn’t. Still, that’s life I suppose – you win some and you lose some. I can only hope that tomorrow he’s on top-form and whizzes through all the jobs in record time, and visits the toilet in his own time, not mine!

So you might ask, how do some ‘less scrupulous’ garages ensure that every job is profitable. Well, that’s easy – they ‘discover’ additional work that may not need doing, whilst your car is in bits. Now your gearbox is off and your car immobile, they phone you to say that your flywheel is knackered as well and it needs ’skimming’. That’ll be another £100 please and no, you don’t really have any choice. It’s pay-up or just be without your car whilst they push it outside with the gearbox in the boot! Of course, sometimes other bits are worn out that you couldn’t predict due to lack of X-ray vision or psychic powers and in these cases, a call to the customer explaining exactly what’s happened and offering to show them while it’s still dismantled will generally result in them OKing the additional part. One thing guaranteed is that we can always show the customer the faulty or worn-out part, so they can see for themselves why it was vital to replace it.

The other way of always ensuring a profit is to do what some garages seem to do, which is simply to think of a price and then ‘double it’ – if the customer agrees, they’ve always got an inbuilt profit margin if things go a bit wrong and if all goes to plan, they’re going to get rich much quicker! Me, I think I’ll just try and toilet train my technicians a bit better and fine them if they’re in a bad mood.