Is my local garage taking the piss!

£90 for parts and labour ? That’s not bad. Mercedes Benz dealership charges £150 just for diagnostics 😂

Wow, bet your a delight as a customer :)
Depending on what speed sensor & what car really...
Time wise...
Collect car from parking area & drive onto ramp, align ramp arms and put vehicle in the air. Remove wheel (or whatever), use penetrating spray on affixing's, remove offending sensor, clean area ready for replacement. Fit new sensor, rebuild as necessary.
Calibrate new sensor & test drive. Clean vehicle ready for customer collection. Collate job car and create invoice.

15 mins you say?

£60 an hour is a good price for a trained mechanic, dh pays twice that for his money pit of a car my garage charges £70 for lead mechanic or £40 for the apprentice

Surely that depends on where it is and how easy it is to get to?

Absolute bargain tbh

No….the fact that I’ve changed a speed sensor told me that. Not everyone is car illiterate you know. And god forbid even some women know how to work on a car!

If you genuinely believe that garages aren’t having people’s pants down left right and centre then you are deluded.

My son is a technician (apparently they're not mechanics any more). He works for a dealership and barely any tools are provided they have to buy their own. He has at least £20,000 worth of equipment that he is very protective of. As i would be if it belonged to me.
But they do have state of the art ramps, computers etc. They charge about £75 an hour.

I had a mobile mechanic come to my house to replace one of my wheel speed sensors recently as it had started to trigger the ESP dashboard warning light. The job took him certainly less than an hour (I didn't time it precisely) and cost me £80, which included £40 for the part. He was someone my DD knew and had done good work on her car too. He was also well recommended locally.

A garage has probably much higher overheads than a mobile mechanic such as rent for the premises, local authority charges, licencing, insurance etc. So I think if you are taking it into a local garage (which I normally would, actually) then £60 per hour is not bad to be honest. Remember that you are also paying for someone who has the training and and back up to get the job done and the experience and equipment to know what to do if things don't go to plan, which can certainly happen when parts are rusted and seized into position.

So that's £60ph?? Wow that is very cheap labour.

What cost were you expecting?

So yes, you are being unreasonable :)

As PP have said, you are paying for the costs of running a garage and the expertise of the mechanic. The mechanic knows which part to get, how to fit the part (without causing damage to other parts of the car) and how the part should function when it is in place.

A lot of the mechanics around me "guarantee" their work, so if you go in for a part to be replaced but the part fails within so many months as long as you have your invoice they will either repair or replace the part for free. For example our mechanic will repair tyres for free if you purchased them off him, they fitted them and have your invoice. I had a tyre off him which kept loosing pressure and putting the low tyre pressure message up (pretty much needed refilling with air every couple of weeks), turns out it had a faulty valve. Valve replaced for free and follow up phone calls for a couple of months to ensure the tyre kept pressure. If the valve wasn't the fault, he would have replaced the tyre for free.

There are a lot of cowboys about who claim to do it cheaper. MIL's partner always makes comments about how our local garage rips people off when "Dave" will do it for cost of parts and £20 an hour. "Dave" is a fucking liability, the amount of damage he has done to MIL and FIL's cars because of poor fitting of parts (and sourcing parts which are for the right brand of car but wrong year/ model and then force fitting them) is awful. It's always a bodge job. He made an absolute mess of fitting a tow bar for FIL and it costs £££ to put right at a proper garage. So yes, whilst it might cost me a couple of hundred to have my car fully serviced at the garage rather than £120 cash, at least I've got the right oil and proper oil filters in my car unlike FIL.

This is so laughably naive it's just silly 😂

My husband is a mechanic, a cheapo £8 Amazon code reader only reads and clears basic engine fault codes.

A professional mechanic’s diagnostic computer accesses all vehicle systems, shows live data, runs active tests, and performs coding, calibrations, and manufacturer-specific diagnostics. They are not remotely the same thing — the cheap one just scratches the surface.

If my husband only had a cheap Amazon one he'd be turning customers away on a daily basis 🤣

£60 per hour is fairly normal!
I wouldn't say £150/hour is, though.

My garage charges about £60 per hour for labour but I think that includes VAT.

And each brand of car needs specific software to programme in new parts, to drill down from generic codes to exact information / live information. You bought an old Casio calculator - the garage is running a modern PC with live update subscription.

In addition, that one minute check has you booking in, then arriving at garage and booking in. Moving car from car park to ramp, and back again. It includes a wee neb around at the rest of the car. Maybe getting a multi-meter out and checking specific sensor when they isolate it. Also the knowledge to know really odd things - like my old car actually had two MAF sensors, both of which showed up on same fault code, and so you need to spend a few minutes swapping them around to work out which was the failed sensor because of course they were different fitments....I am sure you Amazon scan tool would tell you this of course.

I think you should go set up a garage with your £55 Amazon computer, charge £3 for the minute it took and see how far your business works out...

£60 an hour is cheap.

Luckily, my husband does it for free. He pays for a software licence to scan our cars.

THIS. Most manufacturers only give licence for their full data to be held by very specific brands of scanner and they will be expensive. An £8 amazon one won't give you jack shit apart from a very generic and vague guess.

That is good value.

That £60/hr (even though they say industry is £150) you are being charged is fantastic. I pay £90/hr, main dealers can be upto £400/hr.

It includes a premises rent, thousands of pound of tools, software, lifts. It includes staff training and costs over salary (usually around salary+25-35%). It includes the reception and booking process. Insurance. Energy bills. Small amounts of cleaners, oils, greases etc that add up each day. Computers, paper and printer, phone lines, broadband, website and more.

And let us not forget the skill and knowledge to know what sensor, where it is, how to replace, where to source the part from, and how to generally look after your car.

I have more of an issue that the cost of parts is rocketing. That sensor a few years ago was probably £15... I just had a new turbo actuator. Last one I had fitted was about 25 years ago, and if I remember correctly it was £60. Today it was £320+vat, plus a couple of other parts on top. And this is on a small city car...

Cars are just chuffing expensive.

Another vote for doing it yourself!

Annoyingly, the ones you can buy from Amazon typically will only read the generic data and fault codes. Modern cars have a load more data that's manufacturer-specific and that is only readable by more advanced (read: expensive) scanners.

Did chatGPT tell you that?

My local garage charge £55 just to plug in the diagnostic computer. Despite the fact I bought one for £8 from Amazon and it took less than one minute to isolate the fault. Robbing bastards.

If it's a wheel speed sensor then you're probably right. If it's a gearbox speed sensor then that might be a very different matter.

Fuck me they’re having your pants down. Takes about 15-20 minutes to change a speed sensor!

£150ph is about right. The place I worked for is £198ph

Do it yourself then. Oh wait… you can’t, because you don’t know how. They have the expertise and experience and equipment and the premises. You’re paying for the years they’ve spent learning their trade, for all the costs associated with running a garage and for their wage.

If you don’t like it then go and learn how to look after your own car, buy all the equipment you need and use your own time to do it.

I’m a jeweller and I get so sick of people thinking, “The silver in that onto cost you £100 so that’s what I should be paying.” No. You’re paying for the expertise and the costs of running the business. Stop being cheap.