SHOPSMART AUTOS – CUSTOMER INFORMATION – April 10, 2021
How is your Dealership’s Service Department? (Part One) My father was a marine in World War II, and he had a reputation for scrupulous honesty. I learned from him that you had to level with people. Later on, that got me into trouble in the service business…. That didn’t go over too well in the dealerships. I grew up working in the service department of a Chevrolet dealership in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. My father and uncle started the franchise about the time I was born. As a kid I was always down there washing cars or pricing parts. At that time, GM probably made the best product in the world. After I got out of college, I moved to California and got a job as a service writer at a domestic dealership in a wealthy area. Later, I went to work at a specialty car company that was building high-end cars, and I was their national service manager for years. Bottom of Form What I learned over the years always put me at odds with my bosses. They wanted me to sell more, to recommend service that wasn’t needed and to overcharge for the work being done. Ultimately, I concluded that the fundamental incentives built into the system were dishonest. I couldn’t do it anymore so I got out of the business. So here are a few things I learned that will save you a whole lot of money.Who Is the Service Advisor?
People think of the service advisor (also called a service writer) as a mechanic but basically they are salesmen. They’re even paid on commission. That means that the more work they convince you that your car needs, the more money that puts in their pockets. Another problem is almost no one reads their owner’s manual so they really don’t know what’s best for their car. See, the manual was written by the company that built your car. It is the most accurate description of how to care for it. But when people go to the dealership for routine maintenance, the service advisor pushes the “dealer recommended service” on them. Basically, this calls for oil changes and transmission flushes more frequently than the owner’s manual. For instance, the dealer might recommend changing the transmission fluid every 12,000 miles, whereas the manual recommends changing it every 60,000 miles. If you followed the dealer’s recommendation, that means you’d have four transmission fluid changes that were unnecessary. And transmission fluid changes aren’t cheap — they can run $200, so you might be spending as much as $800 unnecessarily.
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