From the Dashboard

IRA PANGANIBAN

JUST a month or so ago, I was defending this French car brand from the bashing it was getting over social media. This was from a post that revealed one of the owners of a car bearing the French brand was stuck inside the service shop for one year.

Alas, karma was quick to strike because while I was defending that car brand, my own vehicle has been in their service center for about two months already at that time. Now, the guys who were in charge of their communications were very professional and excellent at explaining the situation. So, I put the issue at the back of my mind and trusted they would do their part.

Well, it took 6 months for my car to be repaired after the parts finally arrived. They said they were waiting for the mother company, a multi-brand distributorship, to order and have my car parts shipped so it can replace the worn out ones.

The whole deal cost me six months and a little over P41,000. But that is not the real cost if you compute everything I had to spend because I had no car to move around in Metro Manila for half a year.

So, how did it go? Let me compute it for these car brands who do not stock up on spare parts and make their clients wait months to repair their vehicles.

I had to take Grabcar to do my work everyday. I will limit the expense of my Grab service to twice a day and have it purely from Parañaque, where I live, to Bonifacio Global City or Makati where I usually have my meetings. It was more but let’s make the discussion more simple.

One trip costs me P600 rounded off to the lowest peso amount (this means it could be higher by P1 to P9). At two trips a day, that is P1,200. Doing this five times a week cost me P6,000 or P24,000 a month. At six months, that is P144,000 that I needed to spend for my transportation because the car I bought was in the casa for six whole months.

That does not include the toll fee and tips I have to pay the Grabcar driver. Toll fee should be the same as my computation below and tips at P50 per ride multiplied two times (sorry, I am “kuripot”). That all runs to P12,000 for six months.

Nitpickers will say, but you also have to load gas and pay for toll fees and parking anyway if you had the car. So, okay, let’s compute those expenses.

I load an average of P2,000 a week because the car is diesel-powered. That is about P8,000 a month or P48,000 for the whole six months.

Toll fee is an average of P250 a day so for the whole week, it should be P1,250 or P5,000 a month or P30,000 for the six months. Parking is another P50 a day or P250 a week or P1,000 a month or P6,000 for the whole six months.

Add this all up (P48,000 gas + P30,000 toll + P6,000 parking) and it all adds up to P84,000 that I would have spent had I been driving my car. (Doing this, I just realized how much I saved working from home during the pandemic.)

Now compare this to the P144,000 Grabcar cost plus P30,000 toll fee plus P12,000 tips, and the total runs to P186,000 during the six months I did not have my car. That is a whopping P102,000 more than I would have spent had I been driving my car daily.

Add to that the P41,000 plus of repair cost that I have to pay to the casa to fix my car, and the whole experience put me back by a serious P143,000 just because the company that is supposed to take care of my car wants to save a few dollars in shipping cost.

I did not write this piece to bash the car company. I did not even name them. I wrote this piece to make car companies or service centers who make it a habit to make clients wait for their cars to be repaired to realize how much it is costing the owners.

Filipinos are 75-percent one-car family owners. That means if their car is sent to a repair shop for a long period of time, then the cost for them to travel becomes three times more than what it would cost them to drive their cars around.

This is quite unacceptable bordering on being immoral. Your clients chose your company to spend their hard-earned money on for a car they so needed and wanted. The least the car companies can do is to allow the owners to keep using their cars comfortably with the least expense.

Keeping them waiting so long is not only unkind but also somewhat evil because it makes them spend more. The car owners can also do more if car companies did their jobs in providing quality service. And the additional money spent on not having a car could have been spent on other things like food or a college education.