Relief at big saving on repair cost
Discussion
Had my XXR in for a service and some work today at my local independent specialist. It needed the off side injector harness replacing. Jaguar quoted mega money. Officially the supercharger has to come off along with its ancillaries. The specialist managed to do it in an hour without taking the supercharger off!
I think that the dealers and larger shops (at least here in the States) go by the ridiculous books that dictate the number of hours for a given repair done "by the book". I have even had instances with previous cars where I was having 2 or 3 things taken care of and I was charged labor as if all 3 things were being done separately. The most egregious example was a 1990 Maxima I had that was in for service less than one day but the labor hours added up to more than 8 due to using "book" hours!
Smaller independent types are quite adept at doing things efficiently with short-cuts and charging for actual time versus "book" time.
Doug
Smaller independent types are quite adept at doing things efficiently with short-cuts and charging for actual time versus "book" time.
Doug
The repair time book was our bible when I was in the trade.
No account was ever taken of actual repair times - except we were paid a bonus on the difference. If the book said 6.5 hours for a clutch change, and I did it in three then the customer was charged for 6.5 hours, and I earnt 3.5 hours bonus.
With practice you can get very good at this, often completing three or more seperate jobs at once on the same car. Often we'd co-operate in the workshop and both of us would tear an engine and gearbox out, repair it and ram it back in like a formula one racing team. Sometimes even doing big jobs like this in a lunch hour to make even more money and eating your sandwiches during the road test afterwards.
It was common to actually work a 45 hour week, but do well over a hundred hours of workshop time, earning so much bonus you could more than double your take home pay every week.
No account was ever taken of actual repair times - except we were paid a bonus on the difference. If the book said 6.5 hours for a clutch change, and I did it in three then the customer was charged for 6.5 hours, and I earnt 3.5 hours bonus.
With practice you can get very good at this, often completing three or more seperate jobs at once on the same car. Often we'd co-operate in the workshop and both of us would tear an engine and gearbox out, repair it and ram it back in like a formula one racing team. Sometimes even doing big jobs like this in a lunch hour to make even more money and eating your sandwiches during the road test afterwards.
It was common to actually work a 45 hour week, but do well over a hundred hours of workshop time, earning so much bonus you could more than double your take home pay every week.
Its works the other way too though. If the book times says 2 hours. And its a typical rusty old XK and all the bolts shear off and your there all day. They still quoted the guy 2 hours and thats all you can charge, especially if its warranty.
Its like this with ever garage (main dealer I mean)for every manufacture everywhere, I cant understand why people are so surprised. Must have been like it for 30 years or so, I been in the trade 11 years and each years the times get tighter.
Its worth mentioning, the manufactures use computer simulation to get most of the times, instead of timing people doing the jobs, so some times they are miles out.
Now I'm at Audi, I get 3.0 hours to do a cambelt that I can do in 1.5 hours blindfold. Yet on a different model you get 3.5 and it takes about 5 hours.
It would be nice to charge how every long it takes, and never gain loads and feel a bit guilty, or loose loads and feel cheated, but its not something that a manufacture will ever allow a main dealer to do.
Its like this with ever garage (main dealer I mean)for every manufacture everywhere, I cant understand why people are so surprised. Must have been like it for 30 years or so, I been in the trade 11 years and each years the times get tighter.
Its worth mentioning, the manufactures use computer simulation to get most of the times, instead of timing people doing the jobs, so some times they are miles out.
Now I'm at Audi, I get 3.0 hours to do a cambelt that I can do in 1.5 hours blindfold. Yet on a different model you get 3.5 and it takes about 5 hours.
It would be nice to charge how every long it takes, and never gain loads and feel a bit guilty, or loose loads and feel cheated, but its not something that a manufacture will ever allow a main dealer to do.
Triple7 said:
Thanks Steve, I always thought that was the case but never really wanted to know for sure. Thieving b@stards! 
'Fraid so. Mind you it works both ways. If you charged one customer the time you actually took, and then did an identical repair on another identical car and ran into problems and charged more, then you'd stand accused of ripping customers off. Or a minor design change might make a job more complicated and then you'd go over the book time.
The book was not always right either and some jobs were known to take much longer than the time allowed. We gave them to the apprentice of course
Our best one was get several major services booked in on a saturday morning, get them all up on ramps together and ask the guys in the parts department the night before to make up carrier bags of all the parts needed. Then work through perhaps ten cars all at once going from car to car doing ten oil changes, then ten plug changes, air filters and so on 'till they were all done. Working like this two of us could do a major service properly, without cutting any corners on ten cars in around two hours.
IIRC we got around 3.0 hours for a major service. That's 30 hours booked and charged for and 4 actual hours of workshop time making 26 hours bonus in total so 13 hours each.
Saturday morning was overtime rate too.....Not than ANY main dealer would ever even consider fleecing customers of course....
Edited by Jaguar steve on Wednesday 12th November 08:13
Edited by Jaguar steve on Wednesday 12th November 08:14
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