Potential issues with garage
Discussion
surveyor said:
What's the hourly charge?
That's taken quite a lot of time to fault find on the face of it.
Never asked them - it's probably quite a lot though. They said they'd call me back yesterday with some more information and, surprise surprise, no call. Shall be calling them myself shortly.That's taken quite a lot of time to fault find on the face of it.
Geekman said:
Sorry for the slow reply. Here's what they put on the invoice:
Investigate various electrical faults. Carried out scan test. Checked fuses - okay. Checked wiring continuity to BCM. Found no earth to pin 12 on CR9. Locate and repair poor pin contact on side harness connection.
Total £416.66 labour + VAT @20% = £499.99
And what were / are the symptoms? Investigate various electrical faults. Carried out scan test. Checked fuses - okay. Checked wiring continuity to BCM. Found no earth to pin 12 on CR9. Locate and repair poor pin contact on side harness connection.
Total £416.66 labour + VAT @20% = £499.99
Geekman said:
miniman said:
And what were / are the symptoms?
When the headlights are turned on, the window switches don't work, the interior light stays on dimly and the illumination of the clock and dash buttons doesn't work.As mentioned, it does sound like an earth fault though.
JM said:
SpeckledJim said:
OP is halfway to solving a £1000 problem. Or a quarter of the way to solving a £2000 problem. How can anyone know until it's actually solved?
Or maybe, OP has spent 200% on a £250 repair that has been poorly done and has failed due to poor workmanship. St John Smythe said:
No, but a decent garage would diagnose the problem and tell you how much it would cost to fix.
Wow, that sounds really easy. Must be dead easy then."Hi OP, Tony here at Jagtech. We're about 5 hours in now, and the problem seems to have gone away. That's the good news. The bad news is we've only looked at about a quarter of the potential causes of the original problem. As I say, it looks like we've cracked it, but would you like us to carry on with the other three quarters of the system, cost about another £1500?"
"No thanks, that'll do for now. Thanks for that, I'll be in to pick it up."
next week....
"That problem's back again."
"Ah, ok, must still be something lurking in the other three quarters... "
SpeckledJim said:
JM said:
SpeckledJim said:
OP is halfway to solving a £1000 problem. Or a quarter of the way to solving a £2000 problem. How can anyone know until it's actually solved?
Or maybe, OP has spent 200% on a £250 repair that has been poorly done and has failed due to poor workmanship. He is well within his rights to take it back and get them to check the repair they carried out, and if it has failed, that they then re-repair it at their cost.
Maybe they tried a repair instead of replacing an expensive part, but the customer should be aware of that.
If it was me, I'd take it somewhere local or look at the bit that was repaired myself, as I doubt you have to be that much of a Jag specialist to see if the earth terminal in the door (or whatever it actually is) has failed again.
SpeckledJim said:
St John Smythe said:
No, but a decent garage would diagnose the problem and tell you how much it would cost to fix.
Wow, that sounds really easy. Must be dead easy then."Hi OP, Tony here at Jagtech. We're about 5 hours in now, and the problem seems to have gone away. That's the good news. The bad news is we've only looked at about a quarter of the potential causes of the original problem. As I say, it looks like we've cracked it, but would you like us to carry on with the other three quarters of the system, cost about another £1500?"
"No thanks, that'll do for now. Thanks for that, I'll be in to pick it up."
next week....
"That problem's back again."
"Ah, ok, must still be something lurking in the other three quarters... "
SpeckledJim said:
StoatInACoat said:
SpeckledJim said:
I think most have no idea of the different things and different ways that can throw faults on a car, and how a part C over there needs cooperation from part Y over here and bus 4 over there relies on messages from a sensor ABC over there, and so on...
Patronising. Most do, this is a car forum populated by people who have more than a passing interest in cars and are more familiar than most with how they work. And most of us weren't born yesterday.
Two weeks is not an acceptable length of time for a repair costing £500 (which is not an insignificant amount of money) to last. Be it a car, house, tooth or whatever.
Edited by StoatInACoat on Tuesday 22 October 15:03
Turns out £500 got a temporary fix, and probably some valuable information about what it isn't. Perhaps £1000 will fix it properly. Perhaps it just needs another £20. Perhaps you could spend another £5000 on the best advice money can buy and still not crack it. It's the OP's car, not the garage's, so that issue remains the OP's
The garage isn't (necessarily) responsible for whatever complexity of problem your car has just because you've given them an afternoon to look at it.
I get the feeling that you misread the OP and are trying to save face. When he said £500, that was the amount he was happy to spend without second thought. If the cost of rapairing the fault was over £500 he wanted to discuss the work to be done before agreeing to it.
Notice that it was the cost to fix the fault, not the cost of the time taken to fix the fault.
Subtle difference but an important one in this instance.
On a seperate note. It does seem a bit lax that the garage did the work, without comment, for the exact amount the customer was happy to part with only for the same fault to appear soon after. It is either a sartling coincedence or a bit of a piss take.
[smiley]my2pworth[/smiley]
Bisonhead said:
SpeckledJim, I am the one that is sorry, I just dont understand your logic. You pay a garage to fix a fault, not for their time. The reason they charge you in hours is because this is the metric in which they work. They need time to fix a fault, which they agreed they will fix, hence the charge in hours to do the job...not just to try and do the job in a certain amount of time.
I get the feeling that you misread the OP and are trying to save face. When he said £500, that was the amount he was happy to spend without second thought. If the cost of rapairing the fault was over £500 he wanted to discuss the work to be done before agreeing to it.
Notice that it was the cost to fix the fault, not the cost of the time taken to fix the fault.
Subtle difference but an important one in this instance.
On a seperate note. It does seem a bit lax that the garage did the work, without comment, for the exact amount the customer was happy to part with only for the same fault to appear soon after. It is either a sartling coincedence or a bit of a piss take.
[smiley]my2pworth[/smiley]
You're spot on but I doubt whether you'll ever convince SJ as he's obviously not understood this bit I get the feeling that you misread the OP and are trying to save face. When he said £500, that was the amount he was happy to spend without second thought. If the cost of rapairing the fault was over £500 he wanted to discuss the work to be done before agreeing to it.
Notice that it was the cost to fix the fault, not the cost of the time taken to fix the fault.
Subtle difference but an important one in this instance.
On a seperate note. It does seem a bit lax that the garage did the work, without comment, for the exact amount the customer was happy to part with only for the same fault to appear soon after. It is either a sartling coincedence or a bit of a piss take.
[smiley]my2pworth[/smiley]
Geekman said:
I called them last Saturday and they told me the car was fixed,
Good lcuk OP.TA14 said:
Bisonhead said:
SpeckledJim, I am the one that is sorry, I just dont understand your logic. You pay a garage to fix a fault, not for their time. The reason they charge you in hours is because this is the metric in which they work. They need time to fix a fault, which they agreed they will fix, hence the charge in hours to do the job...not just to try and do the job in a certain amount of time.
I get the feeling that you misread the OP and are trying to save face. When he said £500, that was the amount he was happy to spend without second thought. If the cost of rapairing the fault was over £500 he wanted to discuss the work to be done before agreeing to it.
Notice that it was the cost to fix the fault, not the cost of the time taken to fix the fault.
Subtle difference but an important one in this instance.
On a seperate note. It does seem a bit lax that the garage did the work, without comment, for the exact amount the customer was happy to part with only for the same fault to appear soon after. It is either a sartling coincedence or a bit of a piss take.
[smiley]my2pworth[/smiley]
You're spot on but I doubt whether you'll ever convince SJ as he's obviously not understood this bit I get the feeling that you misread the OP and are trying to save face. When he said £500, that was the amount he was happy to spend without second thought. If the cost of rapairing the fault was over £500 he wanted to discuss the work to be done before agreeing to it.
Notice that it was the cost to fix the fault, not the cost of the time taken to fix the fault.
Subtle difference but an important one in this instance.
On a seperate note. It does seem a bit lax that the garage did the work, without comment, for the exact amount the customer was happy to part with only for the same fault to appear soon after. It is either a sartling coincedence or a bit of a piss take.
[smiley]my2pworth[/smiley]
Geekman said:
I called them last Saturday and they told me the car was fixed,
Good lcuk OP.How, given the information available at the time, could they have possibly done a better job than that? (given that we don't know what's causing the problem now)
You could take the car to a different garage, but you'll lose the benefit of whatever was learned/ruled-out in the previous £500 and be starting basically from scratch.
Operating from the starting premise that it's clearly a simple job and plainly you're being rooked, rather than from the premise that modern Jaguars are bloody complicated and electrical faults can be hard to conquer, might ultimately be self-defeating.
Bisonhead said:
SpeckledJim, I am the one that is sorry, I just dont understand your logic. You pay a garage to fix a fault, not for their time. The reason they charge you in hours is because this is the metric in which they work. They need time to fix a fault, which they agreed they will fix, hence the charge in hours to do the job...not just to try and do the job in a certain amount of time.
I get the feeling that you misread the OP and are trying to save face. When he said £500, that was the amount he was happy to spend without second thought. If the cost of rapairing the fault was over £500 he wanted to discuss the work to be done before agreeing to it.
Notice that it was the cost to fix the fault, not the cost of the time taken to fix the fault.
Subtle difference but an important one in this instance.
On a seperate note. It does seem a bit lax that the garage did the work, without comment, for the exact amount the customer was happy to part with only for the same fault to appear soon after. It is either a sartling coincedence or a bit of a piss take.
[smiley]my2pworth[/smiley]
I see what you're saying (but disagree). I get the feeling that you misread the OP and are trying to save face. When he said £500, that was the amount he was happy to spend without second thought. If the cost of rapairing the fault was over £500 he wanted to discuss the work to be done before agreeing to it.
Notice that it was the cost to fix the fault, not the cost of the time taken to fix the fault.
Subtle difference but an important one in this instance.
On a seperate note. It does seem a bit lax that the garage did the work, without comment, for the exact amount the customer was happy to part with only for the same fault to appear soon after. It is either a sartling coincedence or a bit of a piss take.
[smiley]my2pworth[/smiley]
The bill for £500, IME, will represent a discount over the actual cost of time spent on the job. They are likely to want to get the job done within the constraints for the sake of tidiness and simplicity, and if they're close but not quite there, will get it done and write off the little bit extra. Obviously if they're miles off, then a call will be made.
That's how we'd do it anyway. Rather than call and say "right, £500's up and the job's basically done, but I've got 20 minutes re-building to do. Shall I carry on?". which will likely just interrupt and upset the customer for the sake of bugger-all.
This just sounds like a job that's nothing like changing brake discs - it's an open-ended potential nightmare (for garage and customer).
St John Smythe said:
For a Jag specialist that make their business servicing and fixing Jags, yes, it should be easy to diagnose a problem and provide a quote for repairs.
Well, it isn't. It just isn't.Please find me a modern specialist repairer who'll tell you "diagnosing problems is easy".
Surely it's how they word their invoice?
If you specifically ask them "is the problem fixed?" and they reply "yes", then I'd expect it to last a damn sight longer than 2 days before exactly the same problem reappears.
I'd also expect a reasonable response from the garage as to why I might have to pay for them to fix it again.
It all depends on how they communicate with the customer in the first place and explain the potential causes of the problem.
If you specifically ask them "is the problem fixed?" and they reply "yes", then I'd expect it to last a damn sight longer than 2 days before exactly the same problem reappears.
I'd also expect a reasonable response from the garage as to why I might have to pay for them to fix it again.
It all depends on how they communicate with the customer in the first place and explain the potential causes of the problem.
I agree that you pay for their time and 'expertise' but I have found that the 2 don't often coincide as they should. I have taken my car to a garage with a very detailed description of a fault and they didn't have a clue. There are obviously many components on a vehicle and many possible causes but if you tell a decent heating engineer that the boiler is losing pressure when XYZ happens, he will have an idea of what is the likely cause. He won't take a shotgun approach and spend hours looking at areas that are less likely to be the cause.
The example of the fuse/ECU is surely distinguishable? would they cause the exact same fault? surely ECU would perhaps be intermittent whereas the fuse would be constant.
I also once had a bill on my Lotus for hours spent exploring a fault that was quite obvious and if they had used some knowledge of engineering/physics they could have made an educated guess at what the cause was.
The example of the fuse/ECU is surely distinguishable? would they cause the exact same fault? surely ECU would perhaps be intermittent whereas the fuse would be constant.
I also once had a bill on my Lotus for hours spent exploring a fault that was quite obvious and if they had used some knowledge of engineering/physics they could have made an educated guess at what the cause was.
SpeckledJim said:
No you didn't. You paid for their time (which is 'expert') and equipment.
You don't pay your dentist to cure your toothache. You pay him for his time (expertise comes with that) and equipment.
That both your dentist and your garage are expert is a reasonable expectation. That they can achieve what you ask them to achieve in the time that you arbitrarily allot them is not a reasonable demand.
(the grease bit is unforgiveable!)
Seriously, wtf ?You don't pay your dentist to cure your toothache. You pay him for his time (expertise comes with that) and equipment.
That both your dentist and your garage are expert is a reasonable expectation. That they can achieve what you ask them to achieve in the time that you arbitrarily allot them is not a reasonable demand.
(the grease bit is unforgiveable!)
They've charged him £500 on the basis that they've fixed the fault, NOT for their expertise, which would have been used to diagnose and would have been for a much shorted period of time.
There seams to be a lot of people on here who live in a beautifully simple black and white world, where right is right and wrong should be met with a barrage of flaming hailstones. Yes a garage should be able to fix a fault for an agreed price but that's the easy one...
EG (and not just this one)
With an unknown fault, you are paying them for their time to find the fault and then paying for them to fix the fault. They can't fix the cost for the repair until they have identified the fault, and you can't fix the time needed to find it either, only set a budget which the OP did. They'll use their best endeavours to find the fault and you would hope that paying a higher hourly rate for a specialist, they would know where to look first and find it quicker. It sounds like a bad earth to me and they identified it as a bad earth. It's possible they didn't fix the earth properly or the problem is compounded by something else, neither us or the OP will ever know, all he will know is what the garage tells him...
Take it back to them and ask them to re-check the earth repair (at their cost), if the problem is elsewhere then you'll have to put your hand in your pocket again I'm afraid.
EG (and not just this one)
Bisonhead said:
.. You pay a garage to fix a fault, not for their time.
You do pay a garage to fix a fault if the fault is known, brake pads were used earlier as an example. Easy, "my brake pads are worn", garage removes old, replace with new, fault fixed... Easy.With an unknown fault, you are paying them for their time to find the fault and then paying for them to fix the fault. They can't fix the cost for the repair until they have identified the fault, and you can't fix the time needed to find it either, only set a budget which the OP did. They'll use their best endeavours to find the fault and you would hope that paying a higher hourly rate for a specialist, they would know where to look first and find it quicker. It sounds like a bad earth to me and they identified it as a bad earth. It's possible they didn't fix the earth properly or the problem is compounded by something else, neither us or the OP will ever know, all he will know is what the garage tells him...
Take it back to them and ask them to re-check the earth repair (at their cost), if the problem is elsewhere then you'll have to put your hand in your pocket again I'm afraid.
The Surveyor said:
There seams to be a lot of people on here who live in a beautifully simple black and white world, where right is right and wrong should be met with a barrage of flaming hailstones. Yes a garage should be able to fix a fault for an agreed price but that's the easy one...
EG (and not just this one)
With an unknown fault, you are paying them for their time to find the fault and then paying for them to fix the fault. They can't fix the cost for the repair until they have identified the fault, and you can't fix the time needed to find it either, only set a budget which the OP did. They'll use their best endeavours to find the fault and you would hope that paying a higher hourly rate for a specialist, they would know where to look first and find it quicker. It sounds like a bad earth to me and they identified it as a bad earth. It's possible they didn't fix the earth properly or the problem is compounded by something else, neither us or the OP will ever know, all he will know is what the garage tells him...
Take it back to them and ask them to re-check the earth repair (at their cost), if the problem is elsewhere then you'll have to put your hand in your pocket again I'm afraid.
There was no budget set. The OP was happy for any work to be carried out up to £500, beyond that amount he wanted a discussion. He certainly wanted the problem fixed. It just seems fishy to me that the problem has gone and come back.EG (and not just this one)
Bisonhead said:
.. You pay a garage to fix a fault, not for their time.
You do pay a garage to fix a fault if the fault is known, brake pads were used earlier as an example. Easy, "my brake pads are worn", garage removes old, replace with new, fault fixed... Easy.With an unknown fault, you are paying them for their time to find the fault and then paying for them to fix the fault. They can't fix the cost for the repair until they have identified the fault, and you can't fix the time needed to find it either, only set a budget which the OP did. They'll use their best endeavours to find the fault and you would hope that paying a higher hourly rate for a specialist, they would know where to look first and find it quicker. It sounds like a bad earth to me and they identified it as a bad earth. It's possible they didn't fix the earth properly or the problem is compounded by something else, neither us or the OP will ever know, all he will know is what the garage tells him...
Take it back to them and ask them to re-check the earth repair (at their cost), if the problem is elsewhere then you'll have to put your hand in your pocket again I'm afraid.
In my opinion, the garage played the short game and opted for £500 quid now rather than risk losing custom in the future. Maybe they didnt want to appear to be expensive. Maybe they had no idea what was wrong, made a temp fix and hoped they would get away with it? Who knows.
I understand the world is never as black and white as cause and effect. I would argue that the vast majority of driver/customers would expect to pay a mechanic to fix a problem as well as identify it. Regardless of whether or not it is a clear or complex job, the customer expects it to be fixed (and properly at that). Surely this is what the garage should be aiming for?
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