Pete 386 with the Paccar MX engine

i just send you a PM

 

Read your post,THAT is a LOT of dealerships to avoid!!

 

I'm not sure what my post has to do with the quantity of dealerships to avoid.

 

Not all dealerships are as ethical and will do their best to make a profit at an owner operators/fleet owners expense. Not keep certain items in stock, that should be common outside of a backorder situation is a profit point since if someone needs to get up an running quickly then expedited freight charges may be the only solution.

 

That doesn't make sense.

1) Dealerships exist purely to make a profit at the O/O / fleet owners expense. They aren't a charity. Dealerships have to pay their bills, their employees, and still make a profit. Yet, most of them aren't there to rip off anyone either. Ripping off customers is a great way to ensure no one comes back to you. There's almost always competition nearby that customers are willing to go to. If you think a dealership exists for any reason other than to turn a profit - I have bad news for you.

2) Intentionally keeping items out of stock hurts the dealership just as much as it hurts the customer. You realize that when we can't fix a truck, it means we can't get your truck out of here quicker, which means that we can't fix the other vehicles sitting around. Which means that the other customers can't pay us. So one vehicle sitting in our shop holding up other vehicles hurts us, just like it hurts you.

On top of that, how would we be making ANY money by having a part not in stock? You only get charged when we're clocked onto your truck. If we don't have your parts, we can't work on it, so we can't be clocked onto it. It's counterproductive. We literally want to have as many parts in stock as possible so that we can work on your truck, fix it and move on to the next.

A bad dealership will do the same exact thing, they'll just charge you way more than it should be.

 

All I'm saying is as Commercial Truck Dealer you have a captive group if that person/company has an emissions truck(s). Not all Dealerships are as ethical and why wouldn't any dealership exist not to turn a profit? However,if a dealer has to overcharge their customer(s) to make their overhead or profit that's another story. I have personally ran across many who don't have good business practices. Anyone buying an emissions tractor should educate themselves on the necessary cost to operate them and practice good preventative maintenance as to avoid unneccessary surprises in the future.

 

Do you think dealerships didn't exist prior to emissions trucks?

Dealerships have always turned profit - even before emissions became a thing. If an O/O or fleet buys a truck without an extended warranty - they're fools. We don't care if we're billing Cummins, CAT, Paccar, Peterbilt, or the customer. We just want to be reimbursed for our parts and labor at a high enough amount to turn a profit. In many cases - out of all of those, the customer is going to get the best labor rate because if we bill them what we should, they're never going to come back to us.

And what do you mean if a dealership "has to overcharge" customers? Dealerships barely make money on service departments. Most of our money comes from parts sales. There's virtually no money in fixing the trucks. By the time you've paid for the overhead, the mechanics, the training, the computers, the tools, the software and then discounted all of your bills so that the customers are happy, you're lucky to make some money as profit.

I'm not sure what "good business practices" are to you, but for most dealerships it's having a shop labor rate that rarely gets used because if they used it like they should - everyone would be pissed. Hell - our labor rate is lower than all of our competition and we only bill out at the shop rate when we're doing small repairs.

Once you get into the bigger repairs, costing thousands of dollars - that labor rate starts reducing. Down, down, down. I've seen us lower our labor rate down to $35/hour because of how much labor went into repairing someones truck, we could never charge them for it all.

You only see the front side : Your bill. It might $3,000 and you're mad you paid $3,000 and then write a review on Google and TheTruckersReport that the dealership is the worst and to avoid them.

What you don't see is that the dealer probably wrote off the other $3,000 so you didn't have to pay for it.

So I'm still not sure what you're talking about, but when you know what goes on behind the scenes and how much is involved in the dealership, how much the customers get charged vs how much they should get charged, you'd change your mind. There are always going to be exceptions to this, but the vast majority of the time, you're getting a fair deal.

 

There are dealerships that are the exception. I'm also aware of warranty work that your manufacturer and/or vendor may not cover for whatever reason..I'm not painting all dealerships with a broad stroke,however if I can keep our equipment out of certain shops I know I'll be two steps ahead. There have been a lot of trucking companies and major corporate fleets that have gone the way of the dodo bird with emissions trucks being a factor and a lot of folks such as myself who don't buy them

 

Like all industries, there are some business owners who don't run their businesses as well as others. Dealerships included. Some don't have good techs, good parts managers, good service managers, etc.Most are pretty decent though.

Emissions have issues, but they're not going away. In fact, avoiding them is going to be getting more difficult - so it's probably best to accept it sooner rather than letter so you know what you're getting in to.

 

There was a member off TTR that ran a mixed fleet off EPA 4 and EPA 10 trucks.
His analyse was that the EPA10's ran cheaper then the old paid for iron.