I’ve been around cars for almost two decades, driving in them for about 16 years now. Also, I’ve always had an inclination to fiddle about, change a thing or two, improve, subjectively speaking, the looks or an aspect relating to performance. I’m still no expert on cars, and I can barely work with my own two hands—my fingers resemble longganiza sticks according to family, friends and golfing buddies, hence zero dexterity. Thus, I am forever reliant on the help of car shops.
I’ve been a suki to a number of car shops in the past, happy with their work. But as my tastes changed and the complexity of the work involved increased, I was forced to move on and find newer shops that are competent, experienced and patient with me, my cars and the type of work I wanted done on them. And it’s been one hell of a roller-coaster ride!
But my point today is: Do you really consider the true value, the significance, the essence of the work you want done on your car?
My college professor used to tell us in school that if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. His main points are: Always look for value in what you’re paying for, who you are hiring or the type of work you’re spending on.
And so it is with cars.
A typical shop mechanic is paid around P500 per day. As we all know that’s barely enough to make ends meet, especially when Mr. Mechanic has mouths to feed, tuition to pay and rent/home loan to amortize. Reputable shops, on the other hand, will have at least five to seven employees and pay rent, and meet quotas for their sales from suppliers, too. In short, both shop and mechanic need to make more money than what we think we should be paying them for. And if both the mechanic and the shop owner are still around, they make few mistakes and know a thing or two about working on cars. It’s this thing or two (or a million and one things actually), which you are really paying for when you have your cars fettled by them.
Let’s look at typical shop charge: change-oil (labor only) costs around P300 while painting a body panel costs around P2,500, thereabouts per panel. While the change-oil aspect is admittedly cheap and easy especially with the right tools, painting a body panel that is scratched up can get far more complicated. Really good painters use good materials, which obviously cost more than your typical auto supply paints. They also use properly working equipment, ideally use a paint booth, wait for the right weather and temperature (dry, no humidity) and try to work in a dust-free environment. In short, really good painters use up more time preparing the surface to be painted and ensuring that the stars are aligned properly—that is to ensure all the aforementioned conditions are met—than when they actually do the painting.
If you’ve seen how the painting is done, you would have noticed that a panel is fully painted in only a few minutes but the preparation can take hours. If the body panel was involved in a minor accident, the complexity increases further because the tinsmith has to hammer the panel perfectly to align with the rest of the car. Today’s automobiles are often rolling works of art with curvy, complex lines, creases and angles, not just straight-up paneled.
Another good example is trouble-shooting an engine problem which I’ve had much experience with, thank you. Your car won’t “idle” properly, the rpm hunting at idle, playing between 800-1,200. Turning on the A/C makes it worse, and when you turn the wheel, it gets even worst.
In my Toyota Supra, we checked if there were any vacuum leaks in the intake tract, checking all the sensors if they were working properly (throttle position sensor, cam and crank sensors), followed by checking if the main timing belt lines up with all the proper marks; afterward the electrical checkups, and lastly the wiring. Nothing came up. We tooled the car for a test-drive and it died. When we tried starting it, it wouldn’t hold idle and would just die. We then checked the fuel system and ignition system. While one of the mechanics finagled underneath my car, he saw an old vacuum hose plumbed underneath that had cracks at the edges. Out of curiosity, he shortened the hose just enough to remove the cracked edges, secured it back onto the port, then tightened it with a plastic zip tie. He asked me to start it, and with a single click the engine started and the straight six idled silky smooth, purring like a kitten.
How would you, if you were a shop owner, charge for that? The mechanic simply shortened and reattached a single hose, which even I could have done myself. I must’ve paid P3,000 for that and I was happy. Why? Because the shop and its mechanics followed a thorough logic, a system by which to check every single component system of the car that relates to engine operations, not simply and blindly checking what was obvious.
When you pay for a service to be done to your car, you are not just paying for the activity, the singular action or series of actions that fix your car. You are paying for a mechanic’s pool of knowledge, experience and systematic approach or thought process as the mechanic goes about the task. It is not a simple, meaningless and mindless task like sweeping the floor or washing dishes. It is a collection of complex ideas, guided by theory and memory from experience. The trick is finding a shop whose mechanics are actually knowledgeable, experienced, competent and, crucially, understand your needs. The shop, on the other hand, understands that it has legal and moral obligations to ensure that the work done by the mechanic has been double-checked, and that as a legal entity of its own, it has responsibilities and liabilities to you, the car owner and customer.
Understand the people on the other side of the fence, and it begins to make a lot more sense. You don’t want mindless monkeys working on your car now, do you?
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