Rip Off Mechanics – or another reason to DIY it
The faithful fuel efficient old TFS mobile had to be checked into A&E a few days ago due to white smoke coming out of the exhaust on start up. A quick google search came up with a potential list of problems that all looked way above my extremely basic knowledge level of car mechanics, and given that all of my time is currently being taken up with getting the new house into ship shape, which I’d class as a productive activity, I decided it was fair enough to outsource this time round. (If I were out playing golf while paying a mechanic to do the work, then there may have been a problem!).
Mistake One – taking it to a random Garage
To save a bit of time and for convenience we just rushed it into a garage near Mrs TFS’s work. I checked out their website and it seemed like a family run and reputable business so all well and good. They had a look at it and rang the Mrs back and said it was the starter motor that needed replacing. I haven’t got a recording of the conversation but I think it went something along the lines of this:
MTFS: “Oh ok then, how much will that cost to replace?”
Moron Mechanic (MM): “Ah well let’s see…. the starter motor should be less than £200”
MTFS: “Ok I will check with my husband and ring back to give the go ahead”
MM: “Sure, no problem”
Mistake Two – Not ringing to check the quote
MTFS then emails me with the “quote”, and again I check online for how much a starter motor costs: about £50 from either eBay and various other online auto parts stores. So I figure it’s about £100-£150 for labour, not amazing rates but still not over the top, so I just tell her to tell him to go ahead with it.
I guess I should have rung back to check the quote myself, but I took it in good faith that it was at least a good ball park of the final cost. I am used to garages coming back with slightly higher final charges than they quote, but this time round I was absolutely floored by the final cost:
£321.60!!!!!
And I even had to work that out myself. Yep, when he rang back he still didn’t give a direct statement of the cost even after the work had been done! All Mrs TFS got was:
“Ah well lets see… the starter motor was £148, then £120 for labour” (you will have noticed that’s still only £268. He still didn’t even quote the final price including VAT until I rang up to question the price (see below)… ridiculous or what!?)
So basically he had “forgotten” to quote for labour costs (and VAT) in the original quote.
Am I being unreasonable in expecting if I ask a mechanic (or any business for that matter) a price to do something, e.g. replace a starter motor, I want the full price including parts, labour and VAT? I’d even forgive the VAT as garages often say “it’s XXX plus VAT” (which he clearly didn’t anyway) but to not quote labour is just totally fucking moronic at best, and deliberately misleading/crooked at worst.
Naturally I was pretty hacked off to hear the price was £268 so rang up to perhaps negotiate £20-30 off if I could. I genuinely didn’t think they’d budge more than that but just wanted to state that I felt the quote was so far out of line that they could give us some sort of discount, and state my case that I thought we’d been misled.
It went down. Big time
TFS: “Hi, Mr TFS here, I’d just like to question the final price for our TFS Mobile”
MM: “Ah yes it was £148 for the motor, £120 for labour, and I forgot to say to your wife I didn’t add on VAT either”
TFS does rough mental calculations and comes to over £300
TFS: “You’ve got to be kidding me, you quoted us under £200 and the final price is actually over £300?!”
MM: “Errm actually no, I told your wife that it would be about £200 FOR THE STARTER MOTOR”
TFS: “Well I think you have clearly deliberately misled her in that case. No one wants to hear a quote for just the parts. Did you think she was going to install the thing herself?”
MM: “I didn’t know how much labour would cost as we hadn’t done it yet”
TFS: “OK, how many starter motors have you installed in your life?”
MM: “We’ve been in business 44 years so yada yada yada…”
TFS: “OK so you could have given us a rough ball park of the final costs including parts, labour and VAT?!”
MM: “I’ve never had a problem with the way I quote before”
TFS: “Come on… don’t bullshit me {I wish I’d said it like this}. You are saying people are happy to get quotes and then come back and find they are nearly double the original quote!?”
MM: “Please sir don’t swear.” (I hate it when people say this when they are completely in the wrong!)
To keep things short we kind of just went round in circles for about 5 minutes like that, with him saying that it was absolutely fine and I was just being unreasonable and making an “issue where there is none”. The most annoying thing was that he was adamant that nothing wrong had been done on his part whatsoever. If there had been some kind of apology and lame excuse about miscommunication and that they’d give us £30 off for good will then they may have even kept us as a repeat customer if the work had been done to a high standard. But alas, it clearly was not to be!
We seemed to be getting nowhere near a compromise when the conversion ended abruptly with him saying:
“OK just come and collect it and pay £148 + VAT”
“Errr… OK” I said and hung up the phone!
I’m pretty sure that would not have happened if they had a leg to stand on so I felt quite vindicated in the end, not to mention extremly happy to save the ~£140 off the price they were trying to charge us!
So anyway, lessons learnt:
- Make time for a DIY attempt at all possible costs
- Go to a recommended garage next time if we have to
- Always confirm the full price of the quote (some will always try to be sneaky but you need to pin them down to as accurate a figure as they’ll give you)
- If in doubt go somewhere else!
- If you feel you’ve been ripped off then argue your case (evidently I did this quite well for once in my life! 🙂 )
If you have any tips on dealing with garages or giving the DIY route a pop then let us know in the comments! And does anyone else have any horror stories from garages/mechanics? It might make me feel a bit better about the whole thing so I’d really appreciate hearing about them 🙂
Discussion (20) ¬
I HATE garages. Working in IT and having a father who is a plumber and a friend as an electrician.. we can fix most things between us; except motors. The problem is that frequently you have no idea just how long or difficult a garage repair job is and so are reliant on them being honest with you. Unless you physically sit with them the whole time.. they could quote almost any amount for the labour cost.
It’s why I’ve now started to change the oil and do basic maintenance myself before taking the bike in for an MOT/Service. I tell them as soon as I call up that I’ve already done XYZ and so they can knock it off their service check list.
Having family and close friends in certain professions sure is helpful! I generally know friends of friends so you are never gonna get a proper F&F discount, but at least you know you hopefully aren’t gonna get totally ripped off. Still, always better to learn it and DIY if you can as you’ll always charge yourself the best hourly rate you can possibly get!
Good idea to start on the basics. I wish I’d paid more attention when helping the old man with our cars when I was a kid, and he’s a bit old to be struggling underneath a jacked up motor to show me what’s what nowadays. Still, at least we have YouTube to help!
Dodgy garages with their expensive repairs contributed to my credit card debt!
Or maybe I was unlucky with a couple of the cars I had and it was always the expensive part that needed fixing/replaced.
Best to get a quote in writing if possible otherwise it’s your word against theirs. At least you got away with having to pay the stupid amount they wanted you to pay.
That’s the thing you’ll never really know if the work needed doing in the first place! Although at least if you ring around you can get an idea of whether the price is OK.
Yea I got kinda lucky this time so it was quite a cheap lesson learnt in the end, which are the best kind as long as you take it on board!
The thing which puzzles me here is how does a starter motor get to cause white smoke coming out of the exhaust? It’s pretty well isolated from the combustion process. And you tend to notice problems with starting by the sound being wrong…
Hmmm. This has got me thinking. I regoogled it and only found one reference to replacing the starter motor and it wasn’t particularly a strongly suggested fix. Maybe they just replaced the glow plugs and charged us for a starter motor?! I will try to have a look under the bonnet this weekend. The only other related cause (totally guessing) is that a lot of forums mentioned timing issues, so if the starter motor was faulty and not spinning fast enough would this not cause initial timing issues, which instantly dissapear once the engine is running (which is what seemed to be happening I.e. the smoke dissapeared straight away). Anyway thanks for the comment as I’ll look into it further!
Hmm, I’m with Ermine on this one.
One thing to remember is that the bright kids at school generally didn’t go on the become mechanics.
Youtube is your friend. Cars are not much more complicated than push bikes. My cars never visit a garage / mechanic.
Many problems with a modern car can be analysed by using the OBD II port. Get yourself a code reader from ebay, plug it in and have a look. The error codes can the be fed into Google. You can figure out what to do.
Cheers for the advice Monkey man, that’s really useful. I’ll have to look into the OBD II port thing (never heard of that before, which is probably quite obvious by now!) Cheers again!
@TFS – it’s tricky this one.
#1. If you work in IT, for example, then you may offer a service that to be trivial and take not very long but you charge quite a lot of money for it (more than mechanics I’d venture). The reason you are able to charge that price is because that is what the market will pay for your services, so maybe the mechanics know their market and that indeed is what the majority of folks will pay without grumbling.
#2. It maybe that the owner of the garage pays his mechanics minimum-wage with no other options to improve that so the employees are supremely disinterested in providing anything other than the most basic service: minimum-wage = minimum-service. See my recent post and associated links for this.
#3. Maybe they thought they could gouge you because they were crooks and you sounded a bit “posh” 😉
Good points Mr S.
1. I don’t mind paying market rates, just give me a proper quote in the first place 🙂
2. It was actually the owner of the garage who gave the quote and who I spoke to. Born and bred British and no doubt very well off (at least on the income side of the wealth balance sheet at least). So no excuses there either!
3. Mrs TFS certainly sounds posher than I do so there is certainly some legs in that theory. 🙂
Well done on the negotiation. Win-win is nice, but often, especially with one-shot deals, it’s a zero sum game. You cleverly got the mechanic to counter himself, too. Cheers!
Ha ha cheers DBF! I wouldn’t really call it a negotiation, more like a straight up argument. Then he just caved all of a sudden. It was really quite bizarre!
I agree. DIY it. That’s the better and cheaper choice.
Muy bueno Paola! Thanks for stopping by and commenting!
Great work negotiating down! I dealt with too many garage issues at the beginning of this year. I think my biggest lessons were to prevent issues as early as possible and to look into fixing myself before even considering a garage!
Totally true Joe. I am running on thin ice and hoping to get it through the winter, then will have a crack at doing some proper maintaining next year. Fingers crossed!
Nice hustle TFS!
I would have enjoyed to hear that conversation over the phone. We live and learn, and the good news is that you managed to avoid the expense on this occasion. Moving forward you’ll be able to minimise or eliminate them altogether.
Having a friend in the ‘know’ is also useful if you don’t know yourself (like me).
Cheers
Huw
Haha, it’s a shame I could not have recorded it to post on here!
Having someone in the know in all kinds of trades is invaluable yep!
Cheers!