"book" time is the industry standard in all of the automotive repair industry. I am a mechanic at a BMW dealer myself. Techs at the dealer work on the same kinda cars every day, and know them inside and out. Something as simple as a rear window regulator I can do in about 20 minutes, and the rear window regulator pays 1.9 hours by BMW service pricing. My answer to that is don't penalize me for being good/efficient in what I do! If it pays 2.4 hours to change a valve cover gasket, I get paid 2.4 hours to change it whether it takes me 45 minutes to complete or 4.5 hours to complete. And trust me, ALOT of jobs on these cars eat our freakin lunch. Parasitic draws of the battery, most bus problems, water leaks/wind noises, all of these problems take an exorbitant amount of time to properly diagnose and fix, yet we don't get paid shit for diagnosis time on these and we usually lose 1/2 a day to a day and a half of labor time to diagnosing these problems. Should I charge these customers 12 hours of labor because it took me that long to properly find/fix the problem? Or would you be damn glad the "book time" for diagnosis was only a couple of hours...

The book time for BMW service at the dealer is not an actual book, but is set directly by BMWNA and is all accessed through the computer terminal. The fact that some, not all, of the mechanics can correctly and competently complete the job faster than the book time is how better mechanics make more money. Would you rather the mechanic finished the job in 50 minutes and just let the car sit there in his stall for another hour? Just so you didn't feel ripped off? Meanwhile the mechanic would be staring at this finished job tying up his stall, stopping him from pulling in his next job... directly affecting his paycheck?

Sorry I got into a rant there, I have just been surrounded by incompetents and ignorance lately and needed to vent a bit... and for some reason this thread set me off for a sec. Sometimes I feel after working with certain people, I would be fully qualified to work the special olympics!

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