Alright story time ; This past June, the A/C on my Mustang went out for the 3rd time in three years. The service department at the dealership I had bought it from after several attempts to rip me off had exhausted my supply of good will towards them. So I decided to go to a different dealership as judging by the symptoms (film on the interior glass, slight chemical smell, then a lack of cooling) pointed to the evaporator core being bad ( a well known problem with the S550 Mustangs).
So I went over to the dealership explained what was going on, gave them my opinion of what I thought it was, and they took the car in. The next day I received a call from the service department. Saying that the found a hose that was leaking. And it would a be $550 fix. I was happy that it would be a relativity cheap fix, but also skeptical because the hose in question was on the front side of the firewall (allegedly) and not in the cabin. Which begs the question, where did the film on the inside of the windshield/windows come from? Anyway, a day later I pick up the car and enjoy ice cold A/C for about six weeks
In the middle of August, my A/C again stops producing cold air. The interior glass is still getting covered in a film pretty quickly (I had been cleaning the glass once a week). So I go back to the dealership and again, say that my A/C isn’t working, and reiterate that I think it’s the evaporator core. They take the car in, and the next day I get a call and shockingly their diagnosis is that it’s the evaporator core and it’s going to be a $2500 fix. Now I know that it’s a labor intensive job and that the dash has to come apart. But that $2500 seemed high based on what their stated labor rate was and what the parts cost involved was (even allowing for a 100%+ markup).
So I start looking through TSB’s, and find the latest one regarding the replacement of the evap core on 2015-2017 Mustangs. The job books out at 5.2 hours. And the parts list retails for around $360 I print out the entire bulletin (which was from 2018 mind you). And head down to the dealership. I get to the service counter, and decide to see if they were willing to work with me at all (the car was only 3 months out of warranty and 4k miles under the mileage limit). The service advisor said that they were not willing to do anything, but I could call Ford Corporate and see if they were be willing to do anything. I then asked her how they came to the $2500 figure for the repair. She pulled up the work order and pointed out “what the technician had put in for labor and parts”. I then produced the TSB, and showed her what Ford’s opinion on how many labor hours and what parts the job requires was, which was roughly half that of what the original estimate was.
I asked to speak with the technician, and hear his side of it. I was told that was not possible, I then asked to see the Service Manager, that was possible. The Service Manger comes out and the service advisor gives him a rundown of what’s happened . He took my stack of papers back to his office, and then returns about ten minutes later, and says that the TSB is correct and that’s what they should be going off of. I then mention that I had paid about $550 two months ago to have the A/C fixed and that the original diagnosis was incorrect and would like to have that $550 credited towards this repair. The Service manager then goes off to speak to the technician, and returns after a few minutes, saying that the hoses they replaced were indeed leaking so they couldn’t credit me anything, but fully understands the optics of the situation from my point of view and will sell the parts for the job at cost. This incident also had the side effect of me being able to get a slightly better deal on a new truck (I’ll get into that in few days when I post my review of the truck.)
So the price of the evaporator core replacement went from $2500 to around $1200, because I didn’t blindly believe what the “expert” said.
In my experience with dealership mechanics, it seems that some of them are just unilaterally making the decision on how many hours they want to charge to for doing a job. Or simply going with whatever published method of doing the repair books out at the most labor hours. I’ve had to “correct” them on no fewer than three occasions in the past 3 years. There seems to be little oversight going on.