Originally Posted by
topflightpro
CDB and John, this has been helpful for me as someone who does not come from a car background to understand things a bit better, particularly in retrospect.
At this point, my wife and I take our cars to an independent repair shop. We had heard good reviews about them, but we were sold when the guy took a look at my wife's Prius and told her: yeah, the care is doing exactly what she said it was doing; he had seen that on a few other Priuses from the same year; Toyota knows about it but doesn't know how to fix it; sell it and buy a new car while it still has value, and then didn't charge her for his time.
As I work in the shop, I realize that it's people. I work for people, not a company, and although the manager and a few guys are good, supportive, work hard, etc, there are others that aren't. I'd follow one tech to the end of the earth. He seems to know everything about every car, and he's every tech's go to if a tech runs into something they don't know how to fix. Not only will the one tech know about it, he'll know all the ins and outs about the job too.
So I'd always go where he is, because I know he's super honest, super accurate, and knows when to say when. I happen to get him into mountain biking and he'd gone 100% into it, to the point he bought a truck just to drive to trails (and down trails to get to more trails). He's gone from a used Cannondale enduro bike to something I don't even know, $5000 something something.
I do a lot of waiving charges. If we diag a car and we can't fix it (dealer thing, transmission thing that we don't service, wiring issue which we also don't do) then I'll waive the charge because it's not like we did the diag and they declined. Some guys charge for it, but I always waive it.
Another thing is bulbs. So book cost is one thing, but sometimes book cost is there to get people to do the work. So battery installs are ridiculously high book time, like 0.5 (half hour or 30 min) for a 5 minute job. Charge is minimal, like $10 or $15, but the book time is there so the job is appealing to the techs. Likewise bulbs are stupid long times for some simple bulbs, so the techs do them. Some are ridiculous pains and worth every penny of install, like a Ford Fusion headlight (almost 2 hours labor because you have to remove the front bumper to get to the bulb) or a Dodge Ram Classic (ditto, so much stuff to take apart to get to bulb). It's not just the time. It's also the risk of damaging stuff. When that bumper is not on the car there's a huge risk of scraping it, dropping it, whatever. I prefer not to take in those jobs so I quote the full price.
However some bulbs are super easy, and still 0.5 or 1.0 or whatever book time. A mean advisor could put it down at full list, at $153 per hour, but we have a "small bulb" item where the labor is 0.2, cost is $14? plus bulb, and so you're out for less than $20. I'll check a bulb and if it takes less than 0.4 then I'll put it down for small bulb and give extra time to the tech elsewhere (like add 0.2 to the courtesy check line).