My dealer charges $115.00 per hour. How much of that is per man hour cost? I know the unions are getting a chunk of that.

My dealer told me 115.00 is lower than BMW & MB.

 

Trust me, only a fraction of that goes to the techs.
Tech will get anywhere from 12.00 to 28.00 per flat rate hour.

 

That's about right for Lexus tech to earn between 10-20% of shop labor. You will need to considering the overhead cost to run the shop smoothly.

The Service dept have to hire a lot valets to pick up the customer cars, park the car, bring the car when you're come in to pick it up, and those valets have to make sure the loaner cars are clean with good among of gas.

The front desk and cashiers.

The waiting lounge with coffee and soft drinks.

Plus, the cost for every Lexus loaners that the service department will have to paid from the cost of the vehicle, insurance, maint.( yes, they will need somebody to take care of those cars), gasoline, clean up and so on. Every year they will sell those cars back to Pre-Owned dept. and get them certified, but service dept. still loosing a lot of money.

Now, the good part...shop equiptments with the latest technology and extented trainning to each tech.

A good service dept. will need a good alignment machine, tire balancer, tire machine, brake latch, scan tool and a lot of computer or TIS ( Technical Infomation System) from Lexus. Those equipments can cost from the cheapest is the scan tool $3,500.00 with software all the way to $40,000 state of the art alignment machine. Most of the Lexus service dept. will need at least 3-5 scan tools, 2 alignment machines, 2-4 brake latches, 2-4 TIS ( around $10k each), 2-4 tire balancers and more. Don't forget to add a set of shop manual for each car and each year.

Sending a tech to Lexus trainning will cost the dealer some where around $1,000-$5000.00 per tech depending on the length of the trainning. The service dept. will have to paid Lexus corp
$250.00 per day to train a tech+hotel/air fare/food+pay the tech each day for his times. A one day class can cost roughly $1000.00, but most class will last at least 2-4 days. Now you time that by 10-30 techs and some Lexus dealer got over 50 techs.

I know they're a lot of bad experience about Lexus services on the web site, but if they f$$ked up your car, then they got enough cash to back it up. Most of the smaller/cheaper independent shop don't have that kind of cash to back it up. You get what you pay for.

 

Great inside info VVT-i. Always interesting to know what it's like to work behind the scenes

 

WOW thanks

 

After all said and done a good chunk of $$$ went to the owner's fat bank account.

 

Yes, those money coming from parts dept. pre-owned and new cars. Service dept. always the one that paid for all the overhead cost and the one who got blame.

Why?. Because you only see the sales dept. only once of the life of your vehicle. You signed the big fat check to the sales and you may not see them again. But you will see service dept. every 5k miles/warranty issue/ regular maintenance ...ect...

 

talkin about in bold. new scanners we are getting ever 4 techs there is a scanner so like my shop aprrox 27 ppl = 7 new scanners = 6000 each = 42000. in scanners with in the next year. they are saying 6 months but we will see