Quote:
Originally Posted by Conor
It's an inherent flaw in how many mechanics are paid (flat rate/per job). It's a high-skill trade, they have to provide their own tools and maintain knowledge. You're not just paying a mechanic for his or her time to perform service, you're paying for all of that, too. Kind of like how you're not paying a wedding photographer just to snap photos, you're paying for their skill, their high-end equipment, travel expenses and suchlike.
Further, warranty times are typically times that are so low that they assume the technician in question has done the repair before/knows each step of the repair exactly. In the case of new models and low-volume models (both of which the FR-S is), a technician is going to be doing pretty much any repair for the first time. To make matters worse (for Scion owners, anyway..), the FR-S is virtually all Subaru and very little about it crosses over to Toyota in terms of maintenance familiarity.
Having said all that it's not surprising that a dealership would want to avoid unnecessary warranty repairs on an FR-S at all costs.
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Yea, I've heard all that before. The solution is simple, raise the price on the hourly rate rather than lying about how long it took.
And here's why your statement is false: has anyone here actually gotten a "refund" on the unspent labor hours when the job did in fact take multiple times less than the book quoted? I think the answer is going to be a unanimous NO.
They claim it takes 3 hours, they call you back with the car ready to pick up after 1 hour...you still paid for all 3. Obviously it didn't take 3 if it was done in 1...so why do they charge the full amount? Because the book is full of shit! It was written with a first time mechanic using hand tools AND taking both a shit and lunch break in mind...working out of a broken garage.