What is it with landrover dealers ?

Having an issue with my Desno sat nav unit. I have found out that Denso offer dealers a repair service for the units. I have now spoken to three dealers with the same reply - Oh we can't possibly do that all we can offer is to fit a new unit at £2500. The unit is manufactured by Denso and they are offering the dealers a service for thier customers and they won't use it. The website is written in English although based in Netherlands so they obviously do deal with UK dealers and the service is for dealers. I have sent them an Email asking if they will deal with me direct but its poor service from Landrover.

I have it on good authority my local stealer needs £180,000 a month to break even. Is there really any need for the extravagant showrooms we now see?
£2500 for a replacement sat nav is just unbelievable.

Is there really any need for the extravagant showrooms we now see?

Whilst there are people with more money than sense this situation will continue. A peep into the workshops behind these facades shows that the people who actually do the work are not enjoying the best working conditions.

You will generally find that if an average workshop has 10 technicians.

2 Apprentices, probably 1 year apart. Neither of which being trained to do more than remove sump bungs.

4 Technicians of 'Service Technician' standard. This means they dont have to have any product knowledge, any training or any real skill. They just need to be competent to bang out services for £440 /hour worked or whatever it is and replace components.

2 Diagnostic Technicians. Meaning they know the basics of electronics, how to work a diagnostic machine and their way around a Land Rover. It doesnt mean they are trained on Land Rovers or have any real experience with them.

2 Master Technician (sometimes 1). Generally they have 10+ years Land Rover experience and are the only technicians who get formal training at Land Rover on their systems. The highest grade of Technicians.


So you can easilly see, in a dealer you can have half the people working there or more. Who have no idea what they are doing. Taking your car into a garage is a gamble about who you get.




Now when you think that Dealers charge £90-140 an hour.

An average Tech is paid under £10 an hour.

You see why dealers get bad reputations and Tech maybe dont care as much as they should....

There's making a profit, and theres ripping peeps oft. They have to make a profit to survive. And there's many a rich person willing to pay the extra to be greeted by a happy face. Leather chair to sit in. Marble floors. Free drinks. Nice flower beds etc. I could happily go without all of that if they did a betterer job when repairing my Freelander and knocked 5k oft the price of a new one with the frills removed. Perhaps even train the monkeys betterer in order for them to be happy and be able to do more.

Vissie said:

You will generally find that if an average workshop has 10 technicians.

2 Apprentices, probably 1 year apart. Neither of which being trained to do more than remove sump bungs.

4 Technicians of 'Service Technician' standard. This means they dont have to have any product knowledge, any training or any real skill. They just need to be competent to bang out services for £440 /hour worked or whatever it is and replace components.

2 Diagnostic Technicians. Meaning they know the basics of electronics, how to work a diagnostic machine and their way around a Land Rover. It doesnt mean they are trained on Land Rovers or have any real experience with them.

2 Master Technician (sometimes 1). Generally they have 10+ years Land Rover experience and are the only technicians who get formal training at Land Rover on their systems. The highest grade of Technicians.


So you can easilly see, in a dealer you can have half the people working there or more. Who have no idea what they are doing. Taking your car into a garage is a gamble about who you get.




Now when you think that Dealers charge £90-140 an hour.

An average Tech is paid under £10 an hour.

You see why dealers get bad reputations and Tech maybe dont care as much as they should....

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Sooo wrong! I walked into a master tech job at Chrysler jeep with no experience on the brand at all! You will find the skill base varies a lot Worksop to workshop, in most the formal titles mean very little, you can have a service tech with huge experience but no aspirations who has been there donkeys years. And as for training I've never worked anywhere where they only send one guy on all the courses! Yes the master tech has to do all the courses but if he leaves there's no back up so the others do their fair share too (if they want to). I don't like to think how many courses I've been on and how many thousand it's cost, some very good some pointless! Good results come from the Workshop working well together and liaising with the manufacturer, if they can't do that it won't work well, my closest dealer isn't so hot yet the next closest seems great!

Yes they're a rip off

Yes techs get crap pay

Yes apprentice training is breeding fast fit brake and oil changers!

Service techs, yes to a degree, there was a mass exodus from one garage I worked in because they changed from group to individual bonus, one service tech was truly useless, with no qualifications, he got fed all the easy stuff, which meant the rest of us suddenly weren't getting bonus and we were getting all the ****! It was an insult that he was taking home more than the master tech each month! The management thought he was great cos of the amount of work he was doing! Then within a month half of the workshop left, suddenly they had no product knowledge and went very quickly from being a well respected garage to an absolute night mare. That's motor trade management at its worst! It used to be a great place to work but a management change destroyed it. But the thing is there was another service tech there who had been at that garage for 47 years at that point, what he didn't know particularly on the older stuff wasn't worth knowing! There was another that was approaching 30 years. So saying they're all grease monkeys is a little harsh

In a lot of places they get treated like ****, the answer to any problem is there's a que of guys waiting for your job! So it's easy to see why they can't be bothered to do a good job or go on the training courses! It's a sad state of affairs, some garages are very good tho and look after there staff unfortunately there aren't enough of them around.

My post wasnt talking specifics. I've known alot of dealers and ive known alot of technicians. I was just trying to average out what ive seen and those numbers i gave are about it.

For every 10 techs in a workshop, atleast half of them have little to no clue about the product. Always when estimating or generalising there are lots of exceptions, but in the motor trade pay rises only come from moving job, very rarely awarded in house. That means alot of techs move jobs every couple of years. Some of those techs that move frequently have alot of skills gained from working on alot of products. Others just jump from ship to ship, before anyone notices they've been skating by. Its sad, but it just seems the way it is.

Vissie said:

My post wasnt talking specifics. I've known alot of dealers and ive known alot of technicians. I was just trying to average out what ive seen and those numbers i gave are about it.

For every 10 techs in a workshop, atleast half of them have little to no clue about the product. Always when estimating or generalising there are lots of exceptions, but in the motor trade pay rises only come from moving job, very rarely awarded in house. That means alot of techs move jobs every couple of years. Some of those techs that move frequently have alot of skills gained from working on alot of products. Others just jump from ship to ship, before anyone notices they've been skating by. Its sad, but it just seems the way it is.

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That I agree with!

^ Totally agree. The best LR independents are run by guys who have been through this dealer treadmill and have realised that they can do the job better and maintain customer confidence.

i went on the spanners when i left school, 4 yrs of college, moved from place to place under yts scheme, can understand why some techs don't have any aspirations to better themselves, i got lucky though, found a garage where the owner cared about his staff, made all the difference