Dispute with garage - diagnostics cost

Danii27

Tarambor wrote: »

You didn't get nothing. You got 3hrs of labour to take the engine to bits to diagnose the faults which needed to be done to find the problem. You then got charged 3hrs of labour to put it back together again when you said you didn't want him to do it.

it didn't cost you £575 to get it diagnosed, it cost half of that. The other half was the cost of putting the car back together. You would have had to pay someone to diagnose it, nobody is going to start to put spanners to an engine for free.

What did you expect, him to do 6hrs of work for free, 6hrs that he could have been working on someone else's car charging £75 an hour labour?

I don’t expect anyone to work for free. Why I feel ripped off is not knowing in advance the expected cost for the diagnostics and then losing my opportunity to move on to a different garage.
Is diagnostics not the same as providing an estimate for the work? Should I not get a price up front an opportunity to say yay or nay before commencing?

AdrianC

"Diagnostics" is plugging a computer in and saying "What fault codes are stored?"
"Diagnosis" in this case is dismantling to find out what's actually causing those codes.
It might be obvious, it might not be. It simply isn't often possible to estimate how long it'll take to identify what's going on.

Aylesbury_Duck

Danii27 wrote: »

People i’ve shown the picture to say he’s only taken off the rocker cover. Maybe this takes 3 hours to take off and put back. I don’t know. I get that I may not be able to disprove he did 6 hours work.

My issue really is that he wasn’t transparent or upfront at the start at what it would cost per hour and the estimated time. I was asking for an estimate and a time estimate. I wasnt given an opportunity to say no it’s to expensive, i’ll go elsewhere thanks.

A picture? How can people looking at a photograph - an instant in time - be sure he's only taken off the rocker cover? That's ridiculous, they have no idea whether that's true or not. I think you should start taking the uninformed advice of these "people" with a pinch of salt and deal with facts. Ask the garage for a complete breakdown of the work carried out and how it relates to the bill. Then you have some proper information to deal with rather than friends who are probably perfectly happy to stir things up and be on your side but who wouldn't put their money where their mouths are if you needed them to.