Thespos,
Remember NY doesn’t allow commercial traffic on the parkways. They then delegate sections of the parkway system to graft-payers - uh, bidders, for towing contracts, so you don’t have fleets of trucks prowling on it. They should have regulated rates, though, as state monopolies.
someone adjust the hamster feed again, please…[sub] dumb double posts [/sub]
Well, I know jack about cars, so I don;t know if this was a rip-off story or not (seems to be to me though).
My girlfriend has a '95 Cherokee. We noticed that the driver’s door was getting kinda wonky, not closing quite right, like it was off it’s track or something. I figured, well, she had just got it checked out for the road trip we were about to go on, so there’s nothing to worry about.
So, we’re in San Diego (we came from Santa Cruz, 75 miles south of SF). The door won’t close. She freaks out, we finally get around to finding a place that’ll take the car then and get it done overnight. It seems that the door-to-body hinge has, well, fallen off. Apparently, this is somewhat common in 95 Cherokees.
So we bring the car in, they quote $290. We drive it over to the lot and leave in our friend’s car. (The reason it wouldn’t close, the tow truck driver shows us, is actually that the lock was in the wrong position, at the outer edge of the door, but the hinge was in real bad shape anyway.)
We pick it up the next day, hinge is fine, nice solid lock on the door, all is peachy, we pay the $290 and be on our way. First thing we notice is that the turn signals are on hyperblink. Instead of “Blink… blink… blink…” like any normal car, they’re on speed, “Blinkblinkblink…”
We say, well, fine, whatever, the damn door closes, maybe they had to tweak some wiring in the door to get the hinge working (shitty logic, I know, but we were releived).
We leave San Diego two days later and go to Riverside (80 miles east of LA) overnight. We leave Riverside at about 2 in the afternoon. We go up I-5 and west on CA-58 to US-101. We stop at a Carl’s Jr for some grub in Atascadero, and get back on the road. This was at dusk.
Some of you may see where this is going.
Being almost dark, she flips on the headlights. Radio lights up, console lights up, headlights don’t light up. This is bad; we still have a ways to go, through some dark foresty roads, no less.
We pull over at a gas station, I change the fuse, no dice. I look through the manual, no dice. I ask the guy behind the counter if he could take a look. We pop the hood, and lo and behold, there’s these two wires loose near the driver’s side headlight, under the hood. Thick plugs on each, one male, one female. They resemble the plugs on fresnels. After three people try to get the damn things plugged together, I say fuck it, and just smash my hand in there and get the fuckers together.
Dice.
Thanks are given, miles are crossed, we make it back to Santa Cruz. (With regular blinkers, thankyouverymuch.)
Now…
Why in the purple fuck were these fucking hicks messing around under my girlfriend’s hood (no comment from the peanut gallery, pleae) when they were paid to fix a door hinge- something my ignorant ass could’ve done in an hour myself?! Five god damned feet from the area where they were working, there’s a deliberately unplugged wire. One that was fucking hard to get to, as three guys took ten minutes to finally reach in and put em back together. And it’s for the fucking headlights! The fucking headlights!!! Those are fucking important!!! We pay you three hundred dollars and you fuck up out headlights? You know those little bubbles they sell with toys inside em for a quarter at the supermarket? Well, I’m gonna fill one of them with oven cleaner, shove it up your asses, and then kick hard.
The car’s worked fine ever since. And I’m very careful with the passenger side door.
As for the actual door repair, it seems a simple sottering job would’ve been fine. I dunno if that’s $290 worth of parts and labor, maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I dunno.
I agree with whomever said honest mechanics are worth their weight in gold. I’ve been lucky enough to know a few. One works just a mile down the road from my parents’ house. One time my cooling fan wasn’t working, and I took it to him to get looked at. He popped the hood, jiggled a wire, and it started right up. Didn’t charge me anything.
(I should add, I wasn’t actually there when he did this, and I knew a lot less about cars then. It would’ve been soooo easy for him to cheat me.)
I like my Volvo because since it’s a 1983 model, it’s not terribly sophisticated. With a Chilton’s manual I can fix practically anything on it myself, and I can ALWAYS spot a scammer. They’re the ones who try to tell me it’s a “complicated job.”
I second that suggestion, Ivylass. Now, whenever I do anything car-related (car shopping, car repairs) I take my father or brother with me, and have THEM talk to the mechanic. If I go alone, I’m scared that something along the lines of what happened to me before will play itself out again.
Ooo, and Lizard: I love Volvos too. Up until fairly recently, they were fairly uncomplicated and easy to fix. Now, I’m scared to look under the hood of a new one. I heard that Volvo was bought by an American company - but not sure about that. They sure do look differently now though.
I think you’ll find lots of bad mechanic stories (and humor) if you go to www.cartalk.com.
heh. Reminds me of the time I went to Jiffy Lube for an oil change. While I was waiting, the guy came in and told me that I was due for an automatic transmission fluid replacement. I responded, “If you can find an automatic transmission in my truck, go right ahead.”
I think there’s a tendency to assume that a vehicle is an automatic; still, after driving your vehicle himself, that’s really inexcusable.
I can guarantee these were not “by the book standardized” labour charges. I took the car to my mechanic this morning. This man I trust and has never tried to rip me off.
He told me to buy my own alternator because it will be cheaper than if he has to supply it. I did, for $75 (+ refundable core charge). He also told me my belt was not in need of replacing at this time. He changed out the part for me right then in 20 mins start to finish (including testing the voltage after). He then charged me the minimum labour charge ($30) since it took less than 30 minutes.
So you tell me how $162 (at $82/hr) for labour is “by the book” labour pricing. I would agree it would take that long if the damn thing had been buried and it would actually take almost two hours to replace, but obviously it takes less than 30mins. For this place to try to charge me almost 2 hours of labour they WERE trying to rip me off.
I don’t know about ordering the alternator because they car would have been ready the same day, but the cost of the equipment plus feeding their families I thought was were the $$$ per hour labour charge came in. Am I wrong in that? If $82/hr (which is not that competitive around here) labour is not enough for the above, then they need to increase their per hour charge, not pad the amount of time it actually will take to do something.
If changing out an alternator is not as easy it seems, why did it only take my guy 20 minutes to do? I broke down the charges for the alternator earlier in this entry. This is no where NEAR a comptetitve rate where I live, this was outright shafting.
As you can see from the many typos above, I’m still rather angry.
I’m sorry, Airman, the bitchiness/anger in my above post is not directed at you, but at that repair center. You just happened to be the unfortunate one that thought there might be justification in their pricing so you get to bear the brunt of it. 
This is not particularly egregious, but I’ll chime in anyway. 1997 Mazda B2300 pickup.
Recently bought new tires for the truck, at a local Firestone* dealer. They “couldn’t help but notice” that my front brake pads were pretty worn and that they recommended replacement. Further, they told me that the rotors were below spec and couldn’t be machined, so I’d have to buy new ones ($89 each).
Now, I’d been keeping pretty careful about checking my brakes, and I knew exactly how thick the pads were. And, yes, they were thin enough that I couldn’t fault the recommendation that they should be changed.
The rotors, however, were another story. These were the original pads - the rotors had never been resurfaced before. I should have asked them what thickness they measured, but didn’t. On this vehicle, the rotors are integral with the hub, so I don’t think they were bullshitting me on the price there (Pep Boys quoted me $75 each). I turned them down since I’d been planning on tackling this job myself soon anyways.
Well, the following weekend I did the brakes myself, and lo and behold those things were nowhere near the stamped discard thickness. Took 'em to get machined for $6 each, and mic’d em myself on their return - still a good bit above it.
While in the waiting room at Firestone, I overheard a service dude telling somebody over the phone that his rotors were too thin to machine, as well. I’m wondering if that’s standard procedure - hell, it’s probably easier to slap new ones on than to machine the old ones. It also seems to be SOP to recommend new wipers at $25 on every car that comes in the door.
“Just do the tires & alignment, and I’ll handle everything else on my own, thanks.” I could have spent a hell of a lot in there…
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- Yes, Firestone. The original tires were Firestones (not Wilderness AT’s and I was happy as hell with them. Wanted the same things again, and it seems that nobody else out here even stocks Firestones anymore.
No problem. I understand. 
Anyway, all jobs have a standardized amount of time that is charged. It’s all in a book, I forget what it’s called, though.
Woe to the mechanic that can’t “beat the book”. That’s where they make all their money, by the way. They charge you x number of hours to do a job, which they can do by law, and when they finish early they work on someone else’s car and charge them. Essentially, they double bill for the same period of time. It’s all nice and legal, too.
Nice scam, eh?
That’s what I was referring to, and any mechanic that fixes cars for a living does it. So, in a sense, they’re ALL dishonest.
If it says “two hours” in the book for the alternator, that’s what you pay for, even if it takes the guy 15 minutes. That’s the price of doing business with a mechanic.
Well, that would be the price of doing business with some mechanics. My mechanic uses the book to give an estimate but he only charges for actual work done. Hell, he didn’t even look up the labour for the work I did yesterday, he just said it would take him about 20 minutes and then after it was done told the biller “minimum labour charge” (which is the equiv. of 30mins work).
I would imagine this book breaks things down by make, model and year of car, no? So changing an alternator in an 88 Chevy Cavelier could be a different time frame in the book than in … I don’t know, a Toyota Camry?
He could, but they wouldn’t pay much attention. Proving the guy was bilking him would be very, very difficult.
Heh. The old ‘machining’ the rotors trick. Gotta be a good moneymaker for lots of repair shops. Most people aren’t going to second guess a mechanic, and brakes, well, they are important! The fact is, turning rotors isn’t strictly speaking even necessary nor desirable.
The trick is to understand what exactly is broken on your car or truck. Whether male or female, if you show up and say “My car won’t start” then they have just hit the figurative lottery. They can throw parts at it all day and charge you the max rate for labor.
On the other hand, if you are able to track down the specific problem definitively or nearly so, you can limit the damage they do. Just be thankful there isn’t a federally subsidized Carecare program similar to our health care system. Can you say $1000 oil changes boys and girls? heh.
Airman Doors, USAF, said
As a former professional mechanic, I want to comment on this. The book referred to is a “flat-rate” manual and there are several publishers of these books. They all agree pretty closely on the time required to do a given job and that time assumes an average mechanic, using average tools in an average shop. And, you may be assured, if statistics show that the time is excessive, it will be reduced in subsequent issues. Anyway, the labor charge quoted to the customer is the time given by the manual, multiplied by the shop’s hourly rate. The customer may either accept the price, or not. If the customer accepts the price, the job is assigned to a mechanic and the repair is accomplished. Airman Doors seems to feel that if the job is accomplished in less than the quoted time, the price should be reduced accordingly. I would like to ask if he would be willing to pay twice the quoted price if the job takes twice the quoted time, no matter for what reason. I am also curious as to why he thinks the mechanic should be penalized for being efficient at his job. If a mechanic is not efficient, he won’t last long in the trade, I can promise that. Neither will a plumber, a lawn mower, a tree-trimmer or a surgeon. Assuming that a repair job is done well and satisfies the expectation of the customer, I don’t see how doing it efficiently constitutes a scam. I am unaware of any business that penalizes employees for being efficient. In a lot of cases, doing the job efficiently requires the purchase of specialized tools and believe me, the shop doesn’t buy them—the mechanic does. If it weren’t to his advantage, he wouldn’t buy them. I might also add that if any business doesn’t operate efficiently, that business won’t survive. And, the charge of “double-billing” is one that can be levied against a lot of professionals.
Also, I am unaware of any specific law that permits or requires automobile repair shops to charge based on flat-rate manuals. As far as I know, shops can charge on whatever basis customers are willing to sustain. The flat-rate system seems to be the one most favored—not because it is a scam, but because it is reasonable. None of this means that crooks don’t exist in the automobile repair business, but being in that business doesn’t automatically make one a crook.
It’s not just to keep trucks from prowling on the parkways, as the other highways also have exclusive towing companies. It’s also to prevent the scene often seen on the street, where 4 tow trucks show up at the scene of a 2 car accident where neither car needs a tow.The rates might be regulated, (the prices seem to be in the same area, anyway) but regulation doesn’t mean they can’t be ridiculous especially for a very short tow.
LouisB has the right of it: if the book says two hours to do an alternator, they charge you two hours (your mechanic. Mauvais seems to own his own business in that he can set his own rates, where in a corporate-owned shop the mechanic has nothing to do with the rates). If your alternator takes half-an-hour to replace, you pay two hours. If your alternator takes four hours to replace, you pay two hours. In this case, the book rate worked against you; I can assure you that in some other cases, the book would work for you.
Now, about this: take a man with you. HA! You’re just reinforcing the stereotype that women don’t know nuthin’ 'bout no auto-mo-biles. I think everyone who buys a car show know the basics of how it operates, whether they learn from a family member or a friend or they take a class.
They only time I was almost ripped off was hilarious. I took my car to a nearby shop for a transmission service. Shortly, the service advisor came into the waiting room and told me that I had a bad leak. Before he could start quoting prices to me, I made a phone call–to my sister. My sister, the auto mechanic. My sister, the former AF jet engine mechanic. She was there in fifteen minutes, told the mechanic “hoist 'er up,” and wiped the spot of transmission oil off with a rag. No leak.
I had the transmission serviced elsewhere.
While of course there are exceptions to the rule, mechanics and their environs is largely if not completely a male dominated world – though I’d argue the worst mechanics are exclusively male as well.
Still, a modicum of understanding beyond “I push the floor thingy and it makes it go” travels a long way towards saving $$ when it comes to auto repair. Following the instructions in the owners manual religiously would do more to save thousands of dollars for the average consumer over the years than anything else I can think of.
Modern cars esp. are very sophisticated w/ complex, interdependent computer controlled feedback systems which ‘assume’ certain parameters – temperature, 02 sensors, etc. If the owners manual says “Premium Unleaded Only” guess what – you can’t use Costco 82. El-Cheapo oil filters are never a bargain. Spark plugs do not last forever. Oil is not a permanent fixture in the engine. Air filters are a requirement, not a suggestion, etc. What’s idiotic, is people are willing to go in debt for 10’s of thousands to get a new car, but balk at spending any money on even bare minimum, factory recommend service interval maintenance.
Most importantly, fix small faults right away – little problems can rapidly become BIG, expensive problems if they are not caught in time. RTFM, and give the whole car a once over weekly at least, or at every fill up.
One often overlooked aspect is the cleanliness of the engine bay and related environs, not to mention the interior and all that. I’ve never worked as a professional auto mechanic, but I’ll bet my last 7/16ths deepwell that they charge more for a dirty, nasty, car versus one that has been carefully, if not necessarily perfectly, maintained over the years.
Who wants to work on a dirty, rusting poorly performing long neglected piece of crap? Similarly, they are less inclined to gouge folks who clearly know what the hell they are doing, and someone who takes pride in their ride qualifies.
To you it may just be transportation from A to B; – but mechanics go into that line of work in the first place because they love cars. The way many people abuse their cars and trucks is truly amazing, wholly apart from any safety aspects they are subjecting us all to, it’s disgusting to see a fine piece of expensive engineering go all to hell.
LouisB, you’re right. I apologize. That was inappropriate of me.
Well lets see. I was charged $10.00 for a Radiator Drain Plug to replace one that self destructed. paid my friend 50.00 for labor to take out my radiator, put the lug on and put it back in.
Thank you, on behalf of honest mechanics, for your most gracious apology. None was due me, since I no longer follow the trade. I was only trying to point out the inherent fairness of the flat-rate method of determining labor charges.