Toyota Dealer's labor Charges?

[Jerold]

My dad's 2000 4Runner Limited power antenna broke like mine did a few months ago. The teeth broke in the motor, so I took it to my dealer's service center to open up the wheel well and clean it out.

I purchased a power antenna online (supposedly Toyota OEM).

Anyway, the dealer estimated 1.5hr labor at the start. It took them 1 hour to finish, yet the still charged 1.5 hours labor.
They even broke the antenna that I gave them and had to clean the motor unit out twice (in the span of an hour).

I wrote an email the the service manager and the general manager and just got a call from the service mgr. He said that these labor costs are spec'd out by Toyota HQ, so every job has a labor time assigned to it that they have to follow.

1. Is this true that Toyota HQ dictates the time/labor for every specific job? If they do, they certainly don't set the $$ amount that service center charge, cause it's not the same labor/hr charges at every center.

2. The service mgr. credited my dad's account for a half hour of labor for their next visit, but I still feel that I'm getting rooked here.

How do they get away with this? Can it be reported somewhere?

My family decided to take our cars to get serviced at Toyota Service Centers so that we are guaranteed quality Toyota parts instead of generic aftermarket ones that a local garage puts in, but it seems like they juat try to take advantage any time they can get a way with it.

When I used to take my cars to a local garage for maintenance, the labor charges were always the time it took them and sometimes they even rounded down.

 

[jeremy9allen]

The time they quoted you is called book time.

Thats how a technician gets paid. Book time is pretty much the time that it should take an experienced technician to complete the job.

You pay the book time (the quoted time).
If it calls for 1.5 hours, and the technician can do the job in 1 hour, It's their gain because they are good at beating book time.

If it would have taken them 3 hours to complete the job, you would have still paid for only 1.5


Thats how technicians get paid. If you can book 60 hours in a 40 hour week, thats great.

You pretty much get rewarded for being that much better,

They are not ripping you off.
Actually, I can' believe they credited you the .5 hr.
You must have great negotiating skills :biggrin2:

 

[Jerold]

Thanks!

They get the 60 hours by (for lack of a better term) piggybacking tech fees. They've gotten rid of the term hourly labor fee and changed it to tech fee ( most likely a legal workaround). That way if they can do multiple jobs simultaneously, they are charging the hourly tech fee for each job. They would get it ALL done in say one hour, but the book time would be 3 hours if done one job at a time. I've come across those multiple tech fee line items on work order receipts.

just to get back to the antenna job... I've read many posts about DIY for the antenna fix when my truck's antenna broke and pretty much everyone said that it should take about 30-45m, an hour tops if you not too slick with car repairs. So, an hour and a half for a "Toyota Master Mechanic" or whatever they call themselves is just padding the profit margin.

Thank for the info on the terminology. More ammo to have for negotiations!!