Posted by Desoto61 [138.162.0.43] on Wednesday, August 19, 2015 at 07:21:37 :
In Reply to: OT rant: why are dealerships full of people who know nothing posted by John in Utah [166.70.201.2] on Tuesday, August 18, 2015 at 16:20:27 :
Because there's no money in diagnostics. Most people would balk at a $300 bill to figure out you needed to replace a $40 part but $200 of that was diagnosing the problem. If they're paid based on book hours then time really is money to them, and the longer the job takes the less they actually make that day.
Heck, your complaint is that they aren't working fast enough, but if it is intermittent then someone has to kind of "live with" your vehicle till it happens and try and track it down and reproduce it and then determine the cause and fix it. That could easily take all day, and you probably don't want to pay for that mechanics hourly rate for 8 hours.
I had an intermittent problem on one of my vehicles. Took me almost a week of having it happen randomly and trying to trouble shoot it a little each time before I actually figured out what was really going on and could fix it. The part was $60 from the junkyard and took maybe 20 minutes to replace, but there were lots of me being stranded on the side of the road for short periods of time and easily a few hours trying to re-create the problem before I figured it out.
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