Pay ONLY What’s Fair for Car Repair
Victoria Stonegate
Author Bio
Victoria Stonegate is the pen name of a veteran journalist and technical writer. Stonegate worked as a freelance writer for 15 years until work evaporated after the economic collapse. This unexpected turn of events put her in a position where she had to reinvent herself and get a new job, which was unlike any work she’d ever done before. One day she found herself in the middle of a frustrating situation: after her car’s Check Engine light came on, she took her car to a dealership to have the problem diagnosed. After the car was repaired and the dealership had verified the repair, the Check Engine light came on again a few days later. She took her car back to the same dealership and was horrified when that dealership not only refused to take responsibility for failing to correctly diagnose and fix her car but wanted to charge even more to repair it again. Confronting that dealership and complaining about their failure brought the price down, but it also put her in the frame of mind that there must be a better way to car repair at a fair cost. That’s when her experience as a journalist and the skills she’d recently learned at her new job collided and gave her an idea. She tested the idea, and it worked. The next time her car needed repair, she put her new plan to work and saved $500.
Description
Do you feel a moment of panic when your car’s Check Engine light comes on, knowing you’ll have to take it to a dealership to have that problem evaluated?
Have you ever been shocked by an estimate for car repair, thinking it sounded way too expensive?
Do you feel like your car is being held hostage because you don’t know enough about cars to evaluate the problem yourself?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, this book is for you.
Pay ONLY What’s Fair for Car Repair is an easy-to-read and easy-to-use ebook that sells for under $3 – you’ll save a hundred times more than that by using this book.
Pay ONLY What’s Fair for Car Repair gives you a specific and easy-to-follow game plan for every time you take your car in for maintenance, diagnosis, or repair. Your knowledge plus this ebook will be a powerful combination against scams. The first time the author tried her own plan, she saved $500 and learned exactly how the information a car service desk worker had given to her wasn’t entirely true. In other words, she caught him trying to scam her into paying double the price she ended up paying.
Pay ONLY What’s Fair for Car Repair gives you a simple set of steps that you can use not just now but throughout your entire life, which means you could ultimately save thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. Use the plan outlined in this book every time you take your car in for diagnosis, repair, or maintenance in order to get the best possible price. Victoria is convinced that if she’d thought of this plan decades ago, she probably would have saved enough money to buy a new car by now. And it’s so easy – once she got the idea she thought, “Why didn’t I think of this before? And why is nobody else doing this?”
Even if you’re knowledgeable about cars, and you’ve done your own repairs for years, you see what is happening in the auto repair world. Every year the onboard computer controls more and more of your car’s functions. In some cars, even the gas pedal is no longer connected directly to the engine. The position of the pedal is read by a computer, which in turn increases or decreases fuel into the engine.
Not only that, but putting more and more control wires and tubes into smaller engine compartments has resulted in less space in which to work. Special tools are often required to perform even maintenance as simple as spark plug removal. This isn’t about whether or not you are knowledgeable enough to fix your car. There are repairs that are best done by a repair facility, and this ebook will be invaluable when you hit those repairs.
Book excerpt
This book is about what to do when your car’s Check Engine light comes on and how to get a fair price for car repair after the Check Engine light has been evaluated. That means you must first have the problem diagnosed and then get an estimate for repair. (However, I use this technique for repairs not related to the Check Engine light, which I describe later in this book.)
In the past, I never had much luck getting a Check Engine light diagnosed by any place other than a dealership that sells the same make of my car. For example, if I had a Ford, a Chevrolet dealership wouldn’t be able to get very far trying to decipher the problem. I believe it’s because cars have become so computerized that it gives carmakers the opportunity to use software that no other car maker can access. (However, you may not have to take your car to a dealership to get the Check Engine light diagnosed. More about that later.)
Here’s why I’m so suspicious of car makers. A Boston TV station ran an investigative report in 2013 about car dealerships. Did you know that the service representatives – the people who work at the car repair counter – get a commission on every repair they schedule?
I never knew that. I assumed they were salaried, because I thought only salespeople get commissions. Why? Commissions are a huge incentive to make sales.
That means service representatives aren’t really service representatives. They’re actually salespeople. In fact, if you’ve ever seen this job advertised on a place like Craigslist, it’s typically listed in the Sales category! So let’s call them what they really are: service salespeople.
Service salespeople might not make enough money to pay their bills unless they convince you to commit to the repair they recommend. A cheap repair means a tiny commission. A major repair means a much bigger commission.
See the problem?
Here’s a brief example. When I was in my twenties, a friend highly recommended a dealership when my car needed a tune-up. She claimed her parents had done business with this dealership for decades and always had a great experience. When I walked into the dealership, I immediately noticed several huge banners hanging from the ceiling that announced a special on tune-ups. And yet when I talked to a service salesman, he quoted a price double the advertised price.
Are you kidding me? I thought.
I pointed at a nearby banner and quoted the price on the banner back to the service salesman. He didn’t flinch. His smile never wavered. He said, “Oh, that’s right. I forgot.”
Yeah, right.
I’ve always been suspicious of car dealerships. But the most important thing I learned from the experience that caused me to write this book is that I haven’t been suspicious enough.
That’s changed. I want to share my experience with you so you can see how bad things had to get before I wised up. And then I’ll tell you how to prevent service salespeople from doing the same thing to you.
Author Website
http://victoriastonegate.wix.com/paywhatsfair