How to find a good garage
1. Find a good garage
As with most buying decisions, it pays to do a little homework before taking your car to be repaired or serviced. First, search online or in a paper directory to create a shortlist of garages near you – if you need to leave your car at the garage, which is highly likely, you’ll be glad it’s not too far away.
Then ask friends and family for recommendations and search online for reviews, bearing in mind reviews or testimonials on the garage’s own website are unlikely to give a balanced view.
We also recommend checking Which? Trusted Trader to see if there’s a local garage that’s part of the scheme. All the garages shown on Which? Trusted Trader have been subject to a credit and customer reference check, an examination of their business procedures and a visit from an assessor, to ensure it’s a reputable business.
Even if you’ve had your car serviced at a specific garage for years, you may like to ask around and check for reviews online – while you may feel you’ve had a good experience, it’s not always easy to verify workmanship and others may have had poor experiences that would be worth knowing about.
Unfortunately membership of a garage code of conduct – Bosch Car Service, The Good Garage Scheme, Motor Codes and Trust My Garage are the largest – isn’t a guarantee of good service. In the last Which? investigation into garage servicing, conducted using mystery shopping in 2014, we found that none of these four codes seemed to result in significantly better, or worse, service than garages that weren’t affiliated to a code.
2. Check prices in advance
Continuing the research theme, it’s now possible to get an idea of how much a service or repair is likely to cost before a mechanic even looks at your car.
As long as you know roughly what you need the garage to do – such as a ‘major’ or ‘minor’ service, or to fix something specific – websites such as ClickMechanic and RAC Garage Compare allow you to obtain quotes from garages in your area, and book online to have the work done. Increasingly, this will include mobile mechanic services that will fix your car at your home or place of work.
If you’re unsure what needs doing, it’s still possible to call round a few garages to ask about their hourly rates, although bear in mind not all garages will take the same time to complete a job. You’ll nearly always find that labour rates at local independent garages are significantly cheaper than a franchised ‘main’ dealer, however you may be able to take advantage of a fixed-price servicing deal at a main dealer that will offer better value in the long term.
Even if your car is still covered by its manufacturer warranty, you’re not obliged to service it at a franchised ‘main’ dealer – it’s a common fallacy that you do. Usually, the only conditions that need to be met in order to maintain the warranty is for the car to be serviced in accordance to the manufacturer’s recommended service schedule, and that any parts used (such as oil or air filters) are manufacturer-approved (not manufacturer-supplied) parts or ones that are of ‘equivalent quality’.