I’m a professional mechanic, I’ve been in this business all my life and in 33 years have held every position from inmate to warden, um, I mean from entry level shop assistant to shop owner. It has always been normal, acceptable, and standard policy to charge for inspection, testing, and diagnosis.
Now there may be exceptions here and there. For instance, if you drive up and say “My radiator hose is broken” and I open the hood and see a ruptured hose, I will give you an estimate for replacing all the radiator hoses and we decide what to do from there. Or if you say “My right brake lamp is out” I’ll put a bulb in it and see if that fixes it before recommending anything else.
But anything else gets charged for, minimum half hour of labor rate, up to 2 hrs for diagnosis. The shop I’m managing now even charges for brake inspections, even if we do the repairs, because we do brake inspections better than anyone else.
Any repair facility that offers free testing and diagnostics is simply not to be trusted. Period. Would you trust a dentist who offered free exams?
All the gimmicks and marketing aside the reason is simple. There are 8 hours in a work day. If I work on your car to figure out a problem for free, I either have to pad the repair to make up for that lost time or sell you more profitable services that you may not need. That simple principle holds true for every repair shop and mechanic out there, there’s no way around it. I don’t see where it is in the best interest of the shop or the customer to do anything for free.
Transparency and trust is everything in this business. If I tell you from step 1 what I’m going to do, how much it costs, and guarantee my work, there will never be any surprises or doubts.