A couple links and some comments

One is a lawyer's site who is a lemon law expert, the other is an ex-mechanic.

http://jimroal.com/repair.html

http://www.normantaylor.com/mechanics_flat_rate_pay_system.html

Having made an entire career repairing cars when I look at what is said on those two sites I know that there is even more to the story than just what you see on them. Back when we had to fight through problems like that 92 Buick Park Avenue misfire, and we weren't paid diagnostic time, a tech like myself could spend several hours working to find out exactly what the problem was, only to then have the customer do what that guy did and say he was going to fix it himself. Even if I had gotten to repair it back then, the repair only paid for the replacement of the computer. The time spent cleaning and tightening the ground connections wouldn't have been paid for either.

Today, not only isn't there proof that any of the labor times in the books have been created by a legitimate time study, many of the labor times are nothing less than fraud. Something that really needs to be done is a real time study for specific repairs and then get the manufacturers to explain why the times that they quote are wrong. You want consumers to have quality repairs? Help to expose and fix all of the problems that the trade faces and progress will be made towards that goal.

On a recent repair that I did, a heater core in a Mazda B3000 (Ford Ranger) a warranty company was involved and they claimed that the labor guide quoted the whole repair at 7 hours. Meanwhile Mitchell showed 7.1 hours, and was very explicit that the time did not include the recovery, evacuation and recharge of the AC. When this was pointed out the warranty company representative tried to claim that the AC didn't need to be discharged to replace the heater core. Well, since he had Alldata I made him look up the procedure and then he saw that the evaporator core under the hood did need to be removed to access the bolts that held the plenum assembly to the firewall. He tried to go from one old flat rate cut the time trick to the next. In the end I wrote the entire exchange into the statements on the work order explaining to the customer why the bill was different than what the warranty company was going to pay. The customer accepted the fact that any help paying for the repair was still help.