There’s an expectation consumers have about having repairs done on a new vehicle… namely, that if something goes wrong, they can take the car into the dealer, get it fixed for free, and get out. That’s the purpose of the new car warranty, right? But all too often, you find yourself putting up hundreds of dollars to fix an issue that the dealer tells you isn’t covered by the manufacturer. What’s up with this?
Well, there are several factors in play - some legitimate, some shady, and some that just defy explanation.
First off, the phrase “bumper-to-bumper” warranty is disappearing from manufacturers’ vocabularies. Your new vehicle may instead have a “limited” warranty, and you’ll find that there are actually quite a few items and situations not covered under that warranty, either because they involve wear-and-tear on the part of the owner, or are deemed to be typical necessities of car maintenance.
Now, I’m going to take a wild guess that most of you haven’t read your warranty manuals cover-to-cover, but even if you had, there are even more specific repair situations such as recalls and service bulletins that manufacturers will only partially cover, and these items can often be the main source of consumer frustration. For example, a car manufacturer may put out a service bulletin suggesting replacing an engine part that requires fluid, or is one of a set of parts. There’s a good chance they’ll cover the labor and the part itself, but not the cost of replacing the fluid… or, they’ll only cover repairs for one part, and if another in the set goes bad, you’re on your own. At the end of the day, you might have to pay $80 to solve a problem that your car had since it rolled off the assembly line, and that’s what really gets to consumers.
All this confusion from the manufacturer is bad enough, but when you throw dealerships into the mix, you get a recipe for disgruntled owners and angry letters galore. There’s something most consumers don’t know about dealership service departments, and without me even going into detail about it, you’ll immediately understand the repercussions: dealers get paid differently for warranty work vs. customer-paid work. The labor rate itself is usually the same, but for warranty work, manufacturers conduct test runs of the repair and then tell dealers how many hours the repair should take and what parts should be used. Of course, with customer-pay work, the repair could be anything and is no longer the manufacturer’s problem, so dealers can take as long as they like and use whatever parts they like.
So play the part of a service advisor for a second, and tell me what you’d do if an owner came in asking for warranty work to be done, when you know your Manager is breathing down your neck for more profits. Some dealers will try to add non-warranty repairs to the service in order to boost the final cost, while others may outright say that an item isn’t under warranty when it actually is.
It seems shady, and in many ways it is… but understand that a service technician doing work in his/her service bay for free is pure lost profit, and the test times manufacturers decree to dealers for warranty work estimates are often conducted under unrealistic conditions. Because of this, dealers have a legitimate beef with warranty work. If the manufacturer estimates 2.5 hours of work for a certain warranty repair, that’s what the dealer will get paid for. If it takes 4 hours because the bolts are corroded, or because the faulty equipment could not be removed cleanly, it doesn’t matter… the dealer only gets paid for those 2.5 hours, and at that point they just worked 1.5 hours for free. With the typical manufacturer warranty now approaching 100,000 miles, it’s easy to see how unreasonable it is to expect a repair to be done in the same amount of time regardless of the car’s age or condition.
Okay okay, I know you don’t feel that bad for dealers. They’re still trying to find ways to get money out of you when you bring your car in for “warranty” work, and that coupled with the confusing coverage from manufacturers is to blame for you having to open up your checkbook to fix someone else’s problem.
