So along those lines of thinking.....dealers or investors don't appreciate the revenue stream generated by needed repairs? The manufacturing groups don't benefit from part sales and the continual cycle of replacement with no conforming year to year applications?
Believe me I'm not narrow minded enough to fault just the dealer. They are a cog in the wheel of automotive greed.
I think its more complex than that.
Typically (and my experience is in the industry but not direct consumer automotive dealer so YMMV)warranty replacement parts are not sold to the dealer but "supplied at no cost". This is typically why you can’t keep your warrranty failed part because the dealer has to send it back to the factory or they get charged for the part.
Then you have the loss of brand equity issue and reduced customer confidence.
Additionally dealerships dont really like warranty work because
A) the factory pays a reduced per hour rate
B) the factory pays a fractional hour
For example when I worked for a major NA OEM ever job had a "book time"...most are familiar with this.
Lets say a head gasket job on a classic inline 6 cylinder diesel engine.
The book might allow 8 hours to RRR the head gasket and the dealer labor rate might be $90/hour.
If you brought your equipment in there and we could complete the job in 4 hours we could charge you $90x8 and collect $720 labor.
However if the tech was a bozo (or something legit like a TTY head bolt snapped in the blcok and had to be extracted) and took 12 hours we could then charge you 90x$12 or $1,080 labor.
But if its a warranty repair...then the mothership had a contracted labor rate of $67.50...and a 75% hour multiplier. Meaning no matter how long that repair took we were only getting $405.
If you have ever experienced a dealership try to deny a warranty claim...even a legit one...this is the logic flow behind it. Dealerships hate warranty work. Its nearly a losing proposition...and this gets misguided and taken out on the customer.
Unless....
When I was in that world I had this old curmudgeon of a service manager. He'd been kicked all over the company. I loved him. No one could understand it. This dude couldnt talk to a hooker without offending her. We even put a dude on payroll just to be a customer service rep to do nothing more than talk to customers FOR our service manager.
What sense did that make? Get a better service manager you say?
This geezer did 15 years in the Navy working on these engines and his specialty was bookkeeping. In short he knew engines isnide and out and knew how to make documentation. He would memorize the service anuals and without ever fabricating a thing...he'd print money.
Was the bolt a little hard to restart?
Ok .25 hours thread repair.
Did you check the oil before starting repair?
Ok .25 hours diagnostic of oil system.
Etc etc etc...Love that old man...but its a lost art. To put his value in perspective I ran a branch that my last year processed $3.5MM in warranty work orders. The year before he was my SM we had 74% warranty capitalization rate. The year he came over it went to 117% You do the math at 60% service labor profit margin and tell me what he was worth...It was a lot more than that $35,000/yr phone clerk and more than the $10k bonus I gave him that Christmas...
