Is my local garage taking the piss!

[Sam9769]

Hi,

Brought my car into my local garage yesterday as a speed sensor needs to be replaced.
The speed sensor is £40 plus VAT but they are charging £90 plus VAT for labour which they say will be approximately and hour and a half.

When I queried the hourly rate the young girl behind the counter said that this was cheap and the "industry standard is £150 per hour!"

AIBU to think that £90 plus VAT per hour is excessive?

My husband did it today after buying the part from Volvo for £40 so I don't need to go to college thanks anyway!

No, it was £99.45 for diagnostics, £108 including VAT per hour for working on the sensor which they estimate will take an hour and a half and £45 for the part so that's £306.45 so far then they are proposing to do diagnostics on the washers at £108 inc VAT per hour so they haven't quoted me for the total cost.

As everyone has said, it’s cheap. And anyway, you could shop around. You chose not to

not to say you’d get a better deal. I doubt you would

Problem solved then.

@Sam9769 great news your husband fixed it himself. Lots of car repairs are fixable at home as I said in my earlier post. Specific car Facebook groups are your friend there!
However sometimes you will need the expertise of a garage.
My dd left school at 16 to do a 3 year technician apprenticeship. She's now in her final year. She works and studies hard for £7.55 an hour. ( yes, at 18 thats all she gets) She's bought her own tools, definitely in the thousands. She has to travel across the country regularly for her specialist college. She would have been very capable to fix your car issue.
That is what you're paying for.

Their computer probably cost a few grand

It’s not just the few minutes or the equipment outlay (although that is a significant ongoing cost), it’s the skill and experience to understand what the equipment is telling them. Any idiot can buy a cheap scanner and fire whatever part the scanner suggests and maybe that’ll fix it, maybe it won’t. Quite often the codes are just another symptom of an underlying issue.

That’s cheap!
they are not taking the pi**.
dealers near me are 220+ an hour - that’s taking the pi**!

Funny how you didn't mention the £99 charge for diagnostics in your OP. You wheeled that one out when most people didn't agree with you and said the price was reasonable and now there's going to be a charge for diagnostics for the washers as well.
So now the price £306.45 so far and that's without the washers.
I still think it's reasonable for the work which needed to be done so far and their hourly rate is cheap.
Anyway, your husband has done it so problem solved but I do wonder if that's why garages charge for the diagnostics. People take care in, garage look at it, tell them what's wrong and they say oh, thanks, hubby will buy a part from somewhere and install it himself which means the garage has spent time disagnosing the fault and don't get to do the repair so lose out on business.

I live abroad and we don't get charged for diagnostics at my local garage at all. The hourly rate is about €90 per hour in a country with a high cost of living.

Absolutely. In my day job (computer networking rather than car mechanics) I routinely use specialist test equipment that costs many thousands of pounds. That expensive equipment will give me clues as to the cause of a problem, but it's my experience and skills that allow me to turn those clues into a root cause and so be able to fix it. That's what my employer is paying me for.