Same Job at Twice the Price, Value?

By Walter Ford

Recently, a customer had his 2000 540i in the shop for a window regulator. He’s recently married and has a baby on the way. Consequently, he had purchased an aftermarket regulator and had a person local to him install it. I did counsel him against the aftermarket regulator as we’ve seen them fail very regularly and will not use them at Valley Motorwerks. His regulator immediately acted strangely and whined badly, prompting a visit to us to install the correct part, well, correctly.

What chaps my behind is that, in most cases, the customer was never made aware that the part was not original BMW. We got the door apart and the lack of quality was immediate and heartbreaking. After looking over the original invoice, it was clear that the other shop had installed it at the FULL retail BMW list price. We only have two cases where we installed the aftermarket unit. One was brought to us after an online purchase, the other; the customer demanded it due to the low price. Both failed within the week. As a matter of fact, the online regulator lasted about 2 blocks. I believe that this happens more often than not at non BMW specialists. They have little to no experience and only see dollar signs when a car rolls into their shop.

The customer with the 540i needed some regular maintenance work on the intake seals etc. We wrote him a quote last year, but due to the reasons above held off. In the meantime, he had taken his car elsewhere to have the oil changed since we are far from his home. The “shop” saw the oil leak that we had diagnosed the previous year and wrote him an estimate. They were charging just about double, the difference was staggering. It was so much more that my friend thought that maybe WE had missed something so he emailed the quote to me.

I asked Alex, our service writer, to go over the other estimate… almost line by line it was the same work we had recommended. When you perform this work, there are a few things you should do maintenance wise and it will save you money. It’s what we call crossover labor. The other “shop” listed everything out and in some cases double charged for labor. Additionally, the auxiliary water pump in the estimate was being sold for $1,000, double what we were charging. The attempted fleecing of my friend continued down the estimate line by line. Needless to say, after explaining this to him and going over the line items he could see what was going on.