Why don't Dealers want to do warranty work?

[Tassie f100]

Originally Posted by Poetic Justice

Sorry to nitpick, but have they said that they don't want to do the work or that they haven't come to the same diagnosis as you have? Running a dealership myself I don't quite understand how any service front of house staff could be trying to get across a message of "we don't want to do your warranty work" without it coming back on them fairly negatively.




By this comment I take it you're not all that up to date with the sheer skills shortage in the automotive sector.

Believe me when I tell you, if we could hire the right people or train existing ones to be better equipped in our workshops, we would!

The reason there is a skill shortage is because of the crap money you pay the mechanics.We see it over and over,the dead heads who are prepared to work cheap stay at the dealership and the good ones go where they will be paid for their skills.Notice all dealerships are flash multi million dollars premises,but they still won’t give the workshop staff reasonable money

[Poetic Justice]

Originally Posted by Tassie f100

The reason there is a skill shortage is because of the crap money you pay the mechanics.We see it over and over,the dead heads who are prepared to work cheap stay at the dealership and the good ones go where they will be paid for their skills.Notice all dealerships are flash multi million dollars premises,but they still won’t give the workshop staff reasonable money

I don't disagree that mechanics should be paid more for what they do (at least some of them, there's also a few earning decent coin if they're good and smart enough to push it.) - but the notion that car dealers are fat cats in general is not always as true as you might believe.

A shiny new showroom might have come at the liability of a million dollars or more because the franchise agreement with the manufacturer dictated they had to do it - food for thought.

[jstanovic]

A work colleague’s son was a mechanic at a Ford dealership. Did his apprenticeship there and was 3yrs qualified and one of head techs at a Ford dealership (pretty switched on young bloke). He was asking for a raise to $28/hr, they would only go to $26/hr so he walked. This was about 12 -18 months ago.

Get more cash working at Maccas with much less responsibility!

[Poetic Justice]

Originally Posted by jstanovic

A work colleague’s son was a mechanic at a Ford dealership. Did his apprenticeship there and was 3yrs qualified and one of head techs at a Ford dealership (pretty switched on young bloke). He was asking for a raise to $28/hr, they would only go to $26/hr so he walked. This was about 12 -18 months ago.

Get more cash working at Maccas with much less responsibility!

Don't blame him. A senior tech should be on more than that.

[Franco Cozzo]

Originally Posted by Poetic Justice

I see that you're pointing out the very valid reasons for the shortage - but the OPs point made it sound like management pick the cheapies on purpose - which is really not the case.

I completely agree that as a trade automotive is not a great one when compared to the earning potential of other trades - but who is to blame?

Car manufacturers that pay pennies on warranty repair work as mentioned?
Car manufacturers hellbent on "capped servicing" and "fixed price servicing"?
Customers who question every dollar spent in an automotive workshop?

At the end of the day trades pay well due to profitability. What is the return for trades such as builders, plumbers, etc? I'm willing to bet that is far higher than the piddily returns the automotive sector makes.

Both good points, but is it the customer thats the problem is it that a second hand car is worth nothing so its not worth spending the money fixing it?

Cars are throw away items - once they go past a certain point they aren't worth fixing, thats the problem is its a low value good.

Notice people don't throw out their Kenworth, their excavator, their crane, their locomotive or their submarine so quickly - they also have mechanics and electricians working on those platforms who get paid significantly more than their light vehicle counterparts.

Much more expensive piece of equipment to replace and it makes sense to repair it, also in the case of commercial vehicles they're directly tied to the income of a business, its an income generating piece of equipment, where as light vehicles are mostly just moving you to and from work, its important but not important enough to sink multiples of four figures into fixing it if you're a pleb like most of us (unless you have rocks in your head and you are a car enthusiast like me lol)

Plumbers and electricians provide critical services on houses/commercial buildings and they're also protected by legislation and Australian Standards, light vehicle mechanics aren't and its an unregulated trade.

If we deregulated those trades, watch their rates fall.

The people continually getting stiffed are the workshops, they're making virtually nothing on parts, neglegible on their labour rates and have huge overheads, like you say there's nothing left for the bloke doing the fixing.

The fun of a sunset industry, if a workshop calls me at work, they get the same price as some random who walks in the door, the person making the biggest cut is a wholesale distributor, say a Burson/Repco, with resellers making good margins as well.

The benefit to me is that Burson/Repco is dealing with the bazillion transactions and phone calls for that margin, its less intensive from a transaction perspective to sell to a few customers at lower margins in higher volumes than the bazillion retail or workshops around.

The other issue is that there's monopsonies forming in this sector in Australia.

[Spammy]

I found the problem was the dealer, not Ford. Our local dealer did everything he could to avoid fixing obvious problems and some of the issues they actually made worse due to the complete lack of mechanical skills.

Finally rang Ford Head office and magically everything was sorted within 24 hours.

Still took me many arguments before the service manager finally agreed they were putting the wrong oil in most of the barras they were servicing. One of the arguments got really heated - he cracked the ****s when I told him that I could not remember him sitting in any of the lectures when I was doing my mechanical engineering degree.

In summary : the purchasing and sales / warranty experience was dreadful, will never buy another Ford. I have purchased a number of other new cars and never had any issues with dealer servicing or warranty repairs.