Are you more expensive than dealerships?
On a short-term basis? Yes.
But..
Short-term. So, inside of the five-year... Remember the warranty period I was talking about? So, in a five-year warranty period on a new car, the maintenance that I would recommend you do... Because I'd ask you, "Are you keeping the car?" And you would probably say, "Yes, I'm planning to keep it a car." Now, if you said, "No," and you're not keeping their car, and you just want the bare minimum maintenance done, by the manufacturer's book, and you're okay with taking a risk on the quality of the car five years from now, we can scale back our maintenance plan to match that of the dealer and be almost the same price, maybe even a little bit under. We could do that. And the normal plan we offer to people is to keep the car for 20, 30 years and prevent you from buying a new one, save you all that capital.
So, you put a little more upfront in the maintenance, and it'll cost you more upfront, that's true. So, on the short term, like I said, yes, the maintenance that our shop recommends tends to be more expensive than another dealer, not by a whole lot, maybe by 20% or so.
But five years from now, you can put those two cars beside each other, and you can put them on a hoist, and pull the wheels off, and you will see which one is still in good shape and which one isn't. And which one would you choose to keep? The one I looked after. If someone wants to buy the car, they want to buy a good used car. Which car do you think they're going to buy? The one that was dealer maintained or the one that was the garage maintained? I guarantee you, mine will be in better condition.
It's a common misconception is that when you're comparing just today's service and you're only looking at the cost of today's service, yes, our visits can often seem like they're more expensive than other shops, and they might actually be. That's true. However, what we do is we do maintenance to last a much longer period of time.
"So, in the long run, it's a lot cheaper than...?"
Yeah. Actually, it's up on our website. If you go to Blog & Tips area our website, and you find the tab that says, The Real Cost of Motoring, you'll see three different ways of owning the car. One of them is replacing the car every five years, and it's a red line. And that's the one that shows doing the minimum maintenance only every day, or not every day, but every couple of months.
You'll see that the cost, it says it in thousands of dollars. The cost is a little bit lower than the green line. The green line, you'll see though, the guy doesn't buy a new car. He keeps car for 30 years. And at the end of the 30 years, you look at who's saved more money, was the guy in the green, who just kept one car and did top quality maintenance. Then, of course, the other question to ask yourself is all that money he saved by keeping one car and doing good quality maintenance, let's say, it's several or many thousands of dollars, what did he do with it?
He might've gone on vacations with his wife, might've bought himself toys. One sec. It's just a phone. But what if he invested the money? What if he invested it somewhere and got a return? Well, everyone knows that in the world of investing, exponential rates are usually what you see. So, after about 20 years or so of money sitting in an account somewhere, the return rate suddenly starts to shoot up. You see it in RSPs, you see it in your account. We keep people's cars for 30 years. That's past the 20-year mark.
So, the money you save by not buying new cars with us, you go and put it in an investment account, and at the end of 30 years, how much money did you make? Not save. How much money did you make off of keeping one car and paying for good maintenance? So, we're in it for the long-term. We are not in it for a day-to-day competition, and we don't compete with any other shop. We're not interested. We're interested in the long-term with people and saving them money down the road.
We keep people's cars for 30 years. We're in it for the long-term. Kevin Tremblay
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