Questions

One hour, charged at the rate for where it happens: $145 in the workshop, $185 on site, $125 on the bench for a control unit. That hour is measurement rather than guessing, and at the end of it you get what was measured and what it would cost to put right, in writing. If the fix takes under fifteen minutes it happens inside the hour and there is nothing more to pay.

Because somebody pays for it either way. A workshop that does not charge for looking has to recover the time in the parts it sells, which is why free diagnosis so often arrives with a part attached to it. The hour is published, and you can take the written result somewhere else.

No, and neither can anybody else. We can tell you whether it sounds like a workshop job or a callout, roughly how long the first hour usually takes on that sort of fault, and occasionally that it is something you can check yourself in five minutes. Naming a part down a telephone is guessing with a confident voice.

Often not. A bench assessment is one hour and it answers three ways: repairable, repairable but not worth it, or not repairable — with the reason and photographs. A repaired unit also keeps the programming it already has, which is frequently the part that makes the difference on an older machine.

The twelve-volt side, yes — the battery, the lighting, the body modules, the accessory circuits, all of it ordinary work. We do not go inside the high-voltage traction system: that is several hundred volts and it is a different trade with its own qualification and its own equipment.

Trucks and machinery are almost always seen where they stand. Cars and vans are usually quicker and cheaper here, because the equipment does not have to be carried to them. Bench work on a control unit only happens at Hatfield Lane.

Twenty-five miles from Goshen carries no travel charge. Beyond that the road time is charged at the workshop rate rather than the on-site rate, which is the cheaper of the two honest ways to do it. The service area page lists the towns we reach before nine o'clock.

From mid-July to the end of October one of us is on call in the evenings and at weekends for machinery standing in a field, at the published after-hours rate. It is a real arrangement rather than a promise to answer any telephone at any hour, which a workshop of five people cannot honestly make.

At what they cost us plus twenty per cent, and the invoice shows both numbers. We take no rebate, commission or bonus from any supplier for fitting one brand rather than another.

You are told that at the end of the hour rather than sold a second one. Some faults need a recorder left on the vehicle and several days of it happening again, and that is a different job with a different price, which you decide to buy or not.

We can clear a code once the reason it was set has been found and fixed. Clearing one to make a light go out is deleting the evidence, and the light comes back — usually on the way home.

No. Both are federal offences, and neither is a service anybody offers honestly. If a vehicle arrives with something like that already fitted we will say what we have found and we will not work around it.

Only with documented proof that the vehicle is yours — title or registration in your name and identification that matches. That is not a formality: the entire value of a security system is that it cannot be got round by somebody plausible with a story.

Any repair we made that fails within thirty days is looked at again without another diagnostic charge. That covers what we did. It is not a warranty on the rest of the vehicle, and a workshop that offers one of those is offering something it cannot pay for.