Feature
The waiting is the hardest part
Contemporary SMR is largely a waiting game, because garages are overstretched and understaffed. Jack Carfrae asks why it is so bad and explores the savings EVs are now bringing to fleets on maintenance.
ou might think that senior executives at specialist service, maintenance, and repair (SMR) companies would be able to jump the queue at a garage, but even they are not immune from the current backlog. Two have very similar stories about trying to book a slot for their personal cars for off-diary repairs. Tim Meadows, COO of Epyx, has this to say: “I had an issue with my own car, and they said it would be three months before they could do the diagnostics on it. That’s just crazy. The dealer was telling me that they only had, I think, one diagnostic technician, and it’s a different skill level to the guy doing the servicing.” Angela Montacute, CEO of Digital Innk, has a
Y 30 | November/December 2024 |
www.businesscar.co.uk
similar account: “My husband was driving the car one day and the engine overheating light came on. He drove home, phoned the garage, and it was two months for a diagnosis. That’s the kind of warning light you don’t want to ignore, so we got it looked at by a small independent guy, and it was quite a serious problem.”
That both bosses casually mentioned comparable issues, it illustrates the extent of the problem, and when you scale that up from individual anecdotes to fleet level, it looks as though a lot of companies and drivers are waiting a very long time, especially if the job is out of the ordinary. Standard-issue services are said to be the thin end of the wedge. They are bread-and-butter
jobs for workshops, can often be handled by junior technicians, and – certainly for vehicles inside the franchised network – you probably know what parts they are going to need before the vehicle arrives. The snarl-up is most acute with diagnostics and off-diary repairs, which is why the average lead time to book a vehicle into a garage rose from 11 days in January 2020 to 13-14 days in September, according to Epyx. “A dealer I was speaking to said the challenge they’ve got is that they can [book in] a standard service in three to five days,” says Meadows, “if you’ve just got an ICE vehicle coming in for a 20,000-mile service, they pretty much do those blindfolded. But if you’ve got something that
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65
