Interesting, I can see it, and haven’t subscribed. Short version: It’s a scam because they don’t let you see the contract before signing, exclude lots of items, aren’t accepted by many shops, and make shops/car owners jump through many hoops to get compensated for covered repairs.
Edit-I left out the fact that they only cover the amount they think is appropriate, anything extra is out of your pocket.
Paywalls often allow some free articles. The metric could be it could be 5 articles total or a few per month.
If it has a Paywall I just move on. The last free trial I had took 5 phone calls and several emails to cancel and still got billed twice and had to go through the whole thing again to get a refund . It was only $ 17.00 but it was my $ 17.00 .
Five years ago, I wrote an estimate to replace the alternator on a 2002 Lexus SC 430, a remanufactures Toyota alternator is about $500.
The service writer told me Car Shield would only pay $200 for an alternator. I asked if he was going to order an aftermarket alternator, he replied “No: the customer will have to pay the difference”.
The customer declined the repair, we lost that sale to the competition, there are at least 5 repair shops within a mile. Every service writer I worked with after that managed to adjust the labor rate and obtain parts to match the extended warranty approved price to be able to retain the work.
If a service writer is too lazy to find a competitively priced part, extended warranty companies can send the part(s) to the shop, the service writer loses any markup profit on the parts.
I work in HVAC. The company which I work for does not accept any “home warranty” plans, nor do we negotiate pricing to appease such companies. Customers who have these pseudo-insurance policies can still use our services, but they must pay our standard pricing, and then go to the insurance company for reimbursement of whatever they will pay. We will cooperate with filing the claim, i.e. our office staff and technicians will spend the time to deal with the claims dept, on the customer’s behalf, but that’s it.
Literally, the only type of entity which we will negotiate pricing with is large property management companies (commercial real estate, or apartment complexes) and we only do that, because the volume justifies accepting lower profit per job. Negotiating with “home warranty” companies, or reducing our standard prices to match these companies’ (often unrealistic) flat-rate reimbursements just doesn’t make sense–so we don’t do it.
Exactly!
A legitimate insurance company takes a few steps to minimize their potential financial “hit”, and that includes having a sufficient number of “insured”, in order to spread the risk.
Likewise, I believe there are many automotive repair (maintenance) shops that don’t have time to deal with warranties. Car dealers work with extended warranties everyday, it represents a portion of the revenue.