A rant
Living full time in an RV comes with alot of changes. Many of those are great, but a few are a bit frustrating. One that frustrates me is that I can only carry a limited amount of tools in the RV and I no longer have a garage to work in (and I don’t have a car lift anymore). This makes doing much of the routine vehicle maintenance much more of a challenge.
I’ve accepted that there are alot of tasks that I used to do that I not longer can and I’ll have to rely on nearby mechanics for alot of this work. I’m OK with that unless as long as they are reasonable.
In the catagory of unreasonable is the local Jeep dealership in Orange Park FL. I took our Jeep in for its 60,000 miles maintenance and was quoted $850 for a bunch of stuff including tire rotation, alignment, oil and filter changes and an alignment. Thats a pretty high price for those services but since I can’d do an alignment myself and an oil change could be done but I don’t want to deal with the mess of an oil change in a campground so I bit the bullet and had them do it. One other recommend service at 60,000 miles is to replace the spark plugs. They quoted an additional $700 to change four spark plugs. This sounded outragous to me. I asked my service advisor why it was so expensive and she said that they charge for 2.3 hours of labor @$220/hr plus the cost of the spark plugs. While I haven’t changed the plugs in a Jeep Wrangler before, I couldn’t imagine how it could take 2.3 hours. She said that they charge 2.3 hours of work because “if I got a good mechanic and he was able to do it faster, then he would lose hours by doing it faster and that if I got a bad mechanic and it took him longer then I wouldn’t be charged extra because he was slow”. I found this infuriating. First, I was at a large Jeep dealer and I expect all the mechanics to be “good”. Second, I wasn’t replacing a crankshaft, just changing 4 spark plugs, even a really poor mechanic should be able to do it much faster. Third, $220/hour to unscrew a spark plug and screw in a new one is crazy.
I said hell no and left. Instead, I decided to do it myself. I bought the 4 plugs for $87 and I had to buy a 5/8” spark plug socket which cost another $15. It took me a grand total of 40 minutes. There is absolutely no justification for charging 2.3 hours for this work.
And if that wasn’t bad enough, the mechanic did a crap job on the alignment and the steering wheel is off center by several degree. Fortunately, I’ve adjusted that before and is a pretty easy fix. I can’t believe they charge $220/hr for low quality work.
Thats it, rant over.