The Hows and Whys of Rate Books
Whatever happened to the mechanic who discovered that the mysterious ailment under the hood was a simple disconnected wire and fixed the mess in under five minutes?
Those sort of happy experiences are becoming less frequent, not because mechanics are lacking in honesty but because of greater acceptance of something called the rate book.
Rate books are widely used by dealerships, independent garages and auto body shops to estimate the cost of routine repairs. The service manager or shop owner consults the book to find the average time that a given repair takes and then applies the shop’s hourly charge to the time.
The best-known rate books are published by Chiltons and Motors for car repair and Mitchells for auto body repair. Also, every manufacturer has its own--quite different--rate books for warranty work.
The estimates are based on time studies conducted by the rate book publishers. An expert clocks mechanics making a given repair and comes up with an average time. Then, a margin or pad or fudge factor is applied. The amount of margin varies greatly, but by various estimates it runs from 20% to 100% of the actual time it takes the average mechanic to perform a job.
An experienced mechanic or auto body technician can almost always beat the rate book, sometimes by half. But there are jobs when things go wrong--bolts break off or parts don’t fit. Theoretically, everything is supposed to average out.
I am often asked whether a repair garage has cheated when a customer is charged for more hours than the car was in the shop. A reader from North Hollywood recently wrote to me saying that he was charged for 3.5 hours of work that actually took only 65 minutes.
“All I know is that the rate book is a rip-off to the consumer. And the posted labor rate is meaningless,” he wrote.
Obviously, the mechanic beat the clock. Few shops charge on the actual repair time. If they did, then you could be socked with an unexpectedly high bill in some cases while getting out more cheaply in others.
The issue is: Who should bear the risk of an unexpected problem during a repair? Under industry practice, the garage takes the risk that a repair will be harder than expected on occasion but makes up for it by adding a margin to the majority of bills.
If the system works that way, it is perfectly fair. Mechanics have plenty of stories about times they ran into unexpected trouble and spent a lot more time fixing something. But it doesn’t always work that way.
The rub comes when a shop encounters a problem and then tries to charge extra. For example, if a mechanic carelessly breaks a bolt and tries to increase the cost of the repair, then the consumer is bearing the risk and paying a high rate.
You can’t look to state agencies for much guidance. The Bureau of Automotive Repair, like most consumer agencies, has no regulations covering how rate books are used, according to state officials.
Another note of caution is that rate books provided by manufacturers to dealers--General Motors, in particular--sometimes provide for fewer repair hours under warranty work than other rate books. Of course, it is easier to repair a new, clean engine than a rusty dirty one.
The best protection for consumers is to shop around among two or three garages for estimates on repairs. And anytime a garage wants to increase the estimated cost of a visit, make sure it is not for something that was part of the original repair order.
