W

If you're out of warranty seriously look elsewhere...

If you're out of warranty seriously look elsewhere. $175 Diagnostic Fees on every individual item that doesn't get rolled into repair prices(although it does get hidden in labor). So lets say they spend an hour taking things apart and find the issue. They then have full access to the part needing to be replaced, but still charge the full book rate to replace it like they have to take everything apart again.

I completely understand that companies/workers need to be paid for their time and diagnosing issues can be quite involved, but in the end the bill should be based on total time spent on the car. You're basically paying double the shop rate for their first hour of work per issue.

Longer/possibly boring details:
I brought my car (e70 x5) in for three issues: sunroof catching and not closing, door latch failure, and the rear door sun screen tab broke causing it to recede into the door. All three issues were described with decent detail to them, the only one of the three needing real diagnosing was the sunroof.

$1800+ later (including $525 in Diagnostic fees which get "classified as labor"!?) and the door latch and sun screen work perfectly. The only thing they did with the sunroof was re-initialize it which I am assuming is the first step in any sunroof diagnosis but I could be wrong (an 8 year old could do re-initialize sunroof in 5 minutes with youtube). Technically the sunroof closes but the core issue of the plastic wind deflector catching was still present and it just overpowers the resistance now, so I can only assume that this will cause increased wear on the motor and other sunroof components. But hey, they were nice enough to "waive" the sunroof initialization cost and "only" charge me the $175 diagnostic fee. (I doubt they are even allowed to charge for the initialization because its so simple). So $175 for 5 minutes of work and didn't even find the real issue in my opinion....lovely. I would assume with a pretty generous assumption that they spent no more than 3 hours total actual labor on my car for a total of $966.99 in labor = $322.33/hour.

Thankfully I had an aftermarket warranty on the car that covered the majority of this, but learned not to take any out of warranty car here.

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