|
Very very few shops charge per hour, as in an actual amount of time. Each job has a set rate in "hours", and you charge off a certain rate. Say, $60/hour. So, for the sake of example, a 1.5hour job is $75 bucks. This is regardless of how much time it actually takes to do the job, whether the mechanic takes more or less than 1.5 hours to get the job done, that's what the shop gets paid. This encourages efficiency and speed, so you can do say 10 hours of work in only 6. My dad can pull an equivalent of 80 hours/week at his job as a Cadillac tech, while being there much less.
Time is money, and mechanics don't get paid to do it the hard way.
Looking at other photos of that Passat, it's tucked under the exhaust manifold (grabbing it from the top being hard), and above the suspension (grabbing it from below being ridiculous). VW's are notoriously labor intensive cars to work on, period. And as far as other late model and future cars? Well, they're certainly not getting any simpler, and trying to package a lot more tech into the same size hole.
__________________
Lets see how far it can go
|