Auto Service News

The garage is open during this time, but we restrict what we book in. To be honest there is very little work, as most want any work to be done before Christmas. We use this opportunity to catch up with our own priorities.

We clean the garage, organise the tools and also catch up with some of the salvage repairs we have within the yard. The problem with buying salvage projects is that you cannot predict when the bargains are. I have seen us wait moths for the right car and then have 3 cars, all going through at good prices. The good news is, we normally have plenty of space in the yard to store these salvage projects, the only issue is finding the time and sometimes the car parts to sort these out.

The period in-between Christmas and New Year tends to be a good time, to get these repairable salvage jobs up on the ramps and get things moving. With many of the breaker yards either shut, working on skeleton staff of just deciding when they want to open, I find using a car part location service such as CarSpareFinder is a good way to locate parts from yards that are open at this time. Normally the postage service has slowed down by this point, so often we get the car parts the next day.

I wish I could say that car salvage go cheaper this time of year, the demand seems just as big as ever, probably getting ready for anew start in the new year.

We are all allowed our opinions and I have one from experience regarding cheap breakdown cover or annual protection as a whole. There are times when this can be valuable and I can tell you that my call out fee is more than the cheapest roadside assistance policies available from certain breakdown cover organisations. But what I believe really happens is that most people never need to call out an engineer and that most people do not need breakdown cover at all and therefore they are not buying cheap breakdown cover at all.

When speak to clients they normally tell me this is the first time in years that they have needed and emergency service and even though they know they are going to get quiet a high bill, when they take into account the years they have not bought an annual breakdown cover policy, they believe they are ahead on the deal.

Just because I am an engineer does not mean my cars cannot breakdown either. In fact I would say I put far more attention into my customers’ cars than my own. The last thing I want to do on my day off is to work on my cars also. What I can say is that in the last 7 years I have never broke down in any vehicle i have owned. I am sure this is common throughout most drivers, the fact is many people buy so called cheap breakdown cover every year for decades and never need to call someone out, so is this a cheap option or not.

I believe, so as long as you know who to ring when something happens and you make sure your car is serviced correctly, you will still be ahead in the money stakes should you need to make an emergency call. As I said at the beginning, this is an opinion only.

It is true we offer a 24hr roadside assistance and recovery service and it is also true if we promise a car to fixed in our garage by a certain time, unless we have been let down by a car parts supplier or something similar, we will do our best to bide by that time.

However when Christmas time comes we have to be more sensible about promising times and how we manage the breakdown cover side of the business.

As a family man I work hard right through the year and I a fortunate to have a hardworking group of guys working for me also, so when Christmas approaches I feel it is the time to spend more time with the family and the guys who work for me, get the same benefits. So when it comes to quoting on completing jobs within the garage, we are always over-quote, to allow for any upsets in the routine. We also refuse work, to be sure the work we have got on, can be finished in time, as it is surprising how much work we get in prior to Christmas.

With more cars on the road taking their owners to late night shopping and visiting friends and relatives, they maybe should have visited earlier in the year; we also find our breakdown cover calls are up, in the run up to Christmas. This we can handle, but come 2.pm on Christmas Eve, the garage and the breakdown cover operation gets shut down for a least a couple of days.

We stick an answering machine on, explaining this point and give alternative numbers to ring, from local garages I know cover this period, but for me and our guys we are closed and my family comes first. Of course the national operators have standby peoples and rotas to get through this period, unfortunately we don’t have these benefits.

One of the unpleasant parts of my job is acting as a recovery service and picking up crashed cars, which can only be described as salvage, sometimes with little resemblance to the shape that the car once was.
We then keep the car salvage in our compound until someone from the insurance company comes and inspects the vehicle to decide what to do with the vehicle, either to send it to a salvage auction, or to be sold for car parts only or just crushed.

It is unpleasant because sometimes, we know that the driver and passengers have been hurt badly, or even in one case had died. So looking at what was left of the vehicle is not a pretty sight. I think they always crush salvage that a fatality was involved in.

I have in the past bought some car salvage and used the garage to rebuild the cars professionally, as we have the tools and experience to make a bad car good again, although it does depend on the level of damage, to whether we take on the project, we are very selective of the vehicle we buy, one for to make sure it can be repaired safely, and two to ensure we make a profit, as sometimes buying car salvage can be a risky business.
Access to the right car parts, is also a real factor. You should not assume that just because we are in the trade, we have access to car parts, which no one else does. It is true we may get a trade discount, but as far as availability is concerned, we are not different to anyone else.

It is the labour and access to professional ramps and tools, which allows making a profit, not the saving on car parts.

Working as a car engineer and operating breakdown recovery vehicles you may think that the national breakdown cover organisations are my competition I say this because I am often asked the question, especially when many of these companies offer roadside assistance policies for under £30.

The truth is that there are customers who will buy an annual policy but many more that choose not too, either because they don’t believe it will happen to them, or they just prefer to pay their bills as they happen.

The result is that most days and nights there are call outs, form stricken motorists who do not have the tools or experience to get that car working again, so we perform initially a roadside assistance call out, but then it may be we have to bring it back to the garage for other repairs.

There are few of us and that is where I see the real competition, does the customer ring my roadside assistance company or someone else’s and because it is an impulse decision or even under distress, stranded by the motorway, you just don’t know who they will contact.

Ironically many of these have deals with say the Green Flag breakdown company as an agent, so you may ring these guys as a call out and get a Green Flag vehicle attending, or often these guys get called out form the Green Flag of which they then charge their agreed fee. It is a bit like buses sometimes. You don’t see one for a while and then 2 come along together and I find myself ringing the competition, to do a call out on the second call. I do however arrange some commission for this.