For many, the question keeps coming back about what kind of shop should they choose for their vehicle repairs, in the dealership or an independent one? The answer is as tricky as the question. So let us discuss it out with logical reasoning. And we can be pretty sure that advantages and disadvantages of both the types of options, would make it easier for all of us to arrive at a decisive conclusion.
Advantage of Dealership Service Departments
The best advantage of taking your car for a repair to a dealership for a collision repair is availing the services of their distinctive departments. They would start the process with the order of giving you access to the proprietary information, of whichever vehicle you have brought to them for a service which has been often proved as necessary for the diagnosis and repair of vehicles, especially, a few year-old ones. Moreover, in a dealership, the service departments mainly focus on the makes and models that they sell. That way they are familiar with those aspects of the car and can easily diagnose the issue.
The Technician Aspect
Technicians in Dealership are usually paid by a method that they call as the flat rate. When a repair job is allotted to a technician in a dealership, he has to start working on it immediately. If a repair work is given a time frame of two hours, the labor price will be twice the shop’s general hourly rate. Reversely, if the technician takes more than the allotted time, the customer would pay only for those two hours of labor. This method of pricing maintains a standard on an hourly rate that stays fixed for the customers as well as rewarding the highly skilled technicians.
The main drawback of this method is that the technicians might hurry to get paid for the total time they work. And in the process of doing the work faster, they might miss out some important part of the repair that can cause huge loss to the customer.
The Cost Factor
From the angle of affordability and costing, independent shops are seen to typically charge a flat rate for all their services. Though they use the same rulebook as the dealerships to assess the time any repair job should take, they charge accordingly. The difference in the entire scenario according to the Salisbury collision repair is that the technician in an independent shop too is usually paid on an hourly basis for which they are able to offer their services at much better prices.
The Bottom Line
With the rapid changes taking place in the world of automotive technology, it becomes important for all the independent facilities to be duly qualified to work on the latest cars. They must always be ready to learn about the latest tech, their methods of working, how to repair and replace them, and receive thorough training on the various equipment. The dealerships too should follow the same rule to stay afloat in the business of repair work apart from the mere selling of cars.