Handling Intermittents

[kal]

Hi, I’m new to this forum. I’ve been a tech for about 30 years and have had to deal with many intermittent issues, many of which cannot be initially verified in the service drive. We are a Honda dealership. If a vehicle shows up with an intermittent problem that cannot be duplicated in a reasonable amount of time we ask the customer to bring back their vehicle when/if the issue becomes more frequent. I personally will not charge the customer in this situation, which is a loss to me being a flat-rate tech. if the vehicle is still covered under the factory warranty we will not even attempt to diagnose or repair a problem if it cannot be verified. We have no experienced hourly-paid techs that can afford to spend all day attempting to duplicate an intermittent issue. Saying that, I recently requested a new position as a self-described service co-ordinater, and the owner agreed to implement it. Our new dealership construction is just about complete and my new job starts the day we move in. It is to be a salary position and one of my duties would include dealing with very intermittent vehicle issues, amongst a whole slew of other service related duties. I will report back on how this change works out for myself and the shop as a whole.

[Patrick McElroy]

If the car is salvage titled or been in a severe collision, I will not tackle an intermittent issue. All other vehicles with intermittent issues I request the driver of the vehicle to accompany me on a test drive to duplicate their issue. That doesn’t always happen but we try. More often than not, the driver will remember / reveal more information to me than they did to the service advisor during write up. I will usually do a four mile loop with most cars. Any drive longer than that, additional labor time is added to the first hour of testing. We also explain to customers that the first hour of testing is to take the “vital signs” of the vehicle so that we can determine a further course of action if the problem is not revealed.  The key to getting paid is documenting everything performed during testing, and communicating along the way with the customer, so as to avoid confusion on their part.

[Randy Lucyk]

We follow a similar procedure to mcelroysauto and second the importance of documentation. I have found that a test drive with the customer for any intermittent, noise or other not easily described issue, goes a long way towards gaining us some patience and understanding from the customer. If we are unable to experience the issue on the initial test drive, we go back to the customer and explain that moving forward with the diagnosis does not always lead to definite results. We also share the attached document when appropriate. We do have a fair amount of success consulting pattern failure databases when it comes to intermittents. It just seems to get us heading down the right path sooner.