Despite the marketing hype, longer intervals between standard services don't neccessarily reduce cost. Donal Byrne reports.
Much is made by car manufacturers these days about the fact that the gaps between service intervals for new cars have become longer and longer. Many cars being launched now will not require a major service until they have been on the road for between eighteen months and two years, which is of course great news for the car buyer.
But longer service intervals don't necessarily mean that the costs of servicing a car are coming down.
If anything, they are going up, as anyone who has shelled out on a recent service will probably know too well.
"Ten years ago cars were due a service practically every 5,000 miles and we used to encounter the same problems again and again. Nowadays there is no such thing as a standard service. People are now coming in for a service but they will always mention some fault - like a warning light, or even two, coming on.
Cars are so advanced these days that we seldom find the same faults as frequently and it can take a lot longer to detect them," says Gerard Lee, managing director of Jetstar Motors in Ashgrove Industrial Estate, Kill Avenue, Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin.
Acknowledging that cars are more complex and therefore more expensive to service and repair does explain some of the high costs involved but it also has to be said that smaller operators like Gerard Lee can afford to provide services at a much lower rate than main dealers.
In many cases a main dealer will charge up to twice what an independent garage does merely by virtue of overheads. Many garages are charging up to €100 per hour for labour because of what they are paying out in wages, insurance costs, investment in technology and premises.
The latter cost has become a huge one for many garages. A complete re-organisation of the way cars are sold in Europe, including Ireland, has required many main dealers to invest huge sums - often millions of Euro - in development of new premises.
"Given the extremely low margins many dealers are selling cars for these days, it is no wonder they have to charge so much for parts and servicing," says one industry insider.
A further cost for bigger garages occurs when, in trying to achieve an ISO mark, they have to employ a certain ratio of staff to customers coming in the door.
This is a little difficult to understand when the busiest periods in the day are in the morning and the evening as people drop off or collect their cars.
A standard service for an average car should cost about €250 but we have heard of people paying twice that, even allowing for the fact that no major extra work has to be carried out.
In some cases we have heard of people leaving their cars in for a standard service only to find that much more work than they anticipated had been carried out. People would be well advised to stress to their garage that if any additional, and probably expensive, work has to be carried out that they should be consulted beforehand.
It is, of course, an old cliché but shopping around in this case is particularly important. You can literally save hundreds of Euro by getting the right garage to do the work you need.
A website called Askaboutmoney.com features correspondence from people very exercised indeed about car repair and servicing costs in this country. Some of it hard to follow and some of it seems off the wall but there are very interesting contributions.
One correspondent says a garage quoted him €801 to replace and install a timing belt. He checked with another main garage and it quoted him €500 for the same job. "Best 20 cent I ever spent on a telephone call," he concludes.
Costs are also lower outside Dublin. Country garages don't have the same overheads and rely far more on constant local trade. I am aware of one man who occasionally spends a very pleasant day wandering around Kilkenny while his car is serviced locally, at a much lower price than in Dublin.
People are beginning to become quite savvy about prices now, says Gerard Lee.
"As money gets tighter people are becoming more aware. A lot of people come in and say: 'Do the basics and if there is anything more phone me before you think about doing it'. Previously a lot of people just dropped it off and told us to do whatever was necessary," he says.
He does, however, believe that people are a little naive when it comes to the costs of running and servicing a car.
"With these long service intervals people don't seem to understand that they involve a lot of extra cost.
"Cars using long-life oil don't need it as frequently but during a service the oil has to be replaced at a cost of about €7.80 a litre. So you need between five and seven litres at that price and that is a big cost, just for the oil."
People, he says, also need to understand that the complexity of modern technology makes for good cars but the biggest source of problems with cars nowadays is electronics.
"I cannot remember the last time we had a cylinder head off a car in here.
"What we see are electrical problems more than anything else nowadays. We really need an information campaign to remind people that their cars are more complex and therefore more expensive to repair."
Such is the pace of change in technology that Mini Ireland has now introduced a special package that includes basic servicing for five years, or 80,000 kilometres, for just €250.
"You can also buy a package that will cover an extra three years, or 50,000 kilometres, for €435. The servicing is basic it has to be said but it is an attractive offer.
"We did it because we believe we have some of the best cars out there. It is also a way of holding on to customers, which is much easier than trying to get new customers," says BMW Ireland's marketing director, Michael Nugent.
So, before you part with your money check around, ask friends for recommendations and get quotes from different garages.
And don't let anyone try to tell you that if a car is not serviced by a main dealer then your warranty is affected. As long as the parts used are up to the recommended standard you won't have a problem.
New trends spell savings
The price of car parts can add substantially to the cost of a service but there has been an interesting trend occurring in the supply of parts in the motor industry which, thankfully, means savings for the car owner.
Until recently you could pay well over the odds for a part supplied by a car manufacturer, even though that part could be sourced independently from the original supplier to the manufacturer.
For example, a headlight unit for a Mercedes car sourced from the distributor of Mercedes in Ireland could cost as much as forty per cent more than a unit - made by the same manufacturer - sourced from a motor factor. Now the manufacturers and distributors seem to have cottoned on to the fact they were the losers in many cases because garages and mechanics would buy direct from a motor factor, or parts supplier.
A Hella headlight from Mercedes for a C-Class model now costs about €250, which is about the same as from a motor factor. A timing belt kit for a VW Golf now costs about €120 direct from Volkswagen and about the same from the motor factor. You can, of course, buy some very cheap parts indeed but be warned that they may not pass the NCT test, as has happened with some brake hoses on the market. Body panels may still be cheaper from the non-official supplier but many industry experts says that they are not always a good fit. If a part is cheap it might be a good reason to be suspicious.