You might think that senior executives at specialist service, maintenance, and repair (SMR) companies would be able to jump the queue at a garage, but even they are not immune from the current backlog. Two have very similar stories about trying to book a slot for their personal cars for off-diary repairs. 

Tim Meadows, COO of Epyx, has this to say: “I had an issue with my own car, and they said it would be three months before they could do the diagnostics on it. That’s just crazy. The dealer was telling me that they only had, I think, one diagnostic technician, and it’s a different skill level to the guy doing the servicing.”

Angela Montacute, CEO of Digital Innk, has a similar account: “My husband was driving the car one day and the engine overheating light came on. He drove home, phoned the garage, and it was two months for a diagnosis. That’s the kind of warning light you don’t want to ignore, so we got it looked at by a small independent guy, and it was quite a serious problem.”

That both bosses casually mentioned comparable issues, it illustrates the extent of the problem, and when you scale that up from individual anecdotes to fleet level, it looks as though a lot of companies and drivers are waiting a very long time, especially if the job is out of the ordinary. 

Off-diary delays

Standard-issue services are said to be the thin end of the wedge. They are bread-and-butter jobs for workshops, can often be handled by junior technicians, and – certainly for vehicles inside the franchised network – you probably know what parts they are going to need before the vehicle arrives. The snarl-up is most acute with diagnostics and off-diary repairs, which is why the average lead time to book a vehicle into a garage rose from 11 days in January 2020 to 13-14 days in September, according to Epyx. 

“A dealer I was speaking to said the challenge they’ve got is that they can [book in] a standard service in three to five days,” says Meadows, “if you’ve just got an ICE vehicle coming in for a 20,000-mile service, they pretty much do those blindfolded. But if you’ve got something that needs some investigation, then that [booking] is being stretched out to probably three or four weeks, because they haven’t got the diagnostic technicians they need. There’s a quite a big difference between that and, as I would call it, standard SMR.”

The hold-ups are largely down to the technician shortage, which is not news. Headlines often focus on the paucity of those trained to work on electric vehicles – which unquestionably impacts the BEV-happy fleet market – but, irrespective of what powers the vehicle, seasoned technicians are just scarce, while sluggish parts supply –depending on the vehicle and the component – can exacerbate the problem. 

In November, the Institute of the Motor Industry’s (IMI) Automotive Vacancies Report, which analysed September figures from the Office for National Statistics, said there were 20,000 vacancies in the motor trade – equivalent to 3.5 for every 100 employees. 

Job postings reported in the IMI’s Labour Market Report – 51% of which were for vehicle technicians, mechanics, and electricians – decreased by 38% year-on-year in July 2024. The organisation attributed it to “a mix of factors… including employer apathy and recruitment fatigue after failed hiring attempts, combined with caution due to economic uncertainty.” 

Long-standing issue

Speaking to Business Car in 2023 – which underscores the issue’s longevity – Justine Bates, then HR director at dealer group Inchcape (she moved to an equivalent role at rival Group 1 in August 2024), explained that the company had looked as far afield as the Philippines as part of its technician recruitment process. 

“It’s not necessarily a retention issue. Once we are able to attract and bring technicians into the organisation, they tend to stay with us – it’s just bringing them in.”

The shortage is not confined to automotive, either. Demand from other sectors for technicians with transferrable skills means they often leave for more lucrative positions elsewhere. 

“When we have lost technicians, the reason is they’ve been poached, and they’ve gone outside the sector,” adds Bates, “the remuneration strategy they are offered is really quite extreme, so much so that you wouldn’t be able – as an automotive retailer – to compete with some of those salaries that are being offered, particularly in the railways and some of the big aviation companies, like Boeing or Bombardier. 

“There is massive demand coming from those sectors, and I think as we’ve come out of the pandemic, those types of industries and organisations have started to accelerate some of the work.”

Then there is the time it takes to carry out the repair. Epyx’s data suggests average vehicle-off-road times (VOR) – the period between a vehicle entering a garage and the completion of the work – have slightly improved, but from a low base. In November, it said they had moved from an average of 1.73 days in mid-2023 to 1.66 days, but that is still behind January 2020’s figure of 1.54 days. Meadows describes them as “undoubtedly a post-pandemic phenomenon,” with a “very real impact on fleet operations.”

The costs are not limited to the workshop, either, because fleets could well be looking at a rental vehicle while the primary one is out of action. 

“It’s not just the fact that the vehicle’s off the road, it’s that they probably have to put the person who would have been driving that vehicle into a hire car,” says Montacute, “so you’ve got the rental cost as well, because that person’s still got to be mobile.”

PHEV-y going

Elsewhere in the SMR world, the great ICE versus EV debate rumbles on – and the losers are plug-in hybrids. At £1,886 excluding VAT, three-year-old PHEVs at 30,000 miles are 31.9% more expensive on SMR than equivalent ICEs (£1,430) and 51.9% dearer than BEVs (£1,242), according to November figures from CAP HPI. The disparity is most obvious in servicing, where PHEVs (£730) attracted a premium of 38% over ICEs (£529) and 216% over BEVs (£231), due to their shorter service intervals and because they are more likely to come from premium brands. 

“From an SMR cost perspective, they [PHEVs] have all the negatives of an ICE vehicle,” explains Steve Chambers, senior editor for SMR at Cap HPI, “they’ve still got that petrol motor – or occasionally one or two of them have diesels – but, fundamentally, you’ve got to put oil in them and that’s one of the biggest issues. 

“As soon as you have a service of any type with an oil change, that’s probably the one key element of cost. Your oil filter doesn’t cost much, your fuel filter doesn’t cost a huge amount… oil is just such a big expense.”

Tyres aside, EVs look good

Chambers says electric vehicles have played into the longer service intervals manufacturers have been chasing for years, knowing their appeal to the fleet market all too well, but the lower servicing costs are counteracted by tyres to a degree. Cap HPI’s November figures for BEV rubber at the same three-year/30,000-mile point came in at £943 – 5.8% and 43% more expensive than PHEVs (£891) and ICEs (£659) respectively – driven primarily by the average wear rate. At the same age and mileage point, BEVs got through an average of 3.8 sets of tyres next to 2.0 for ICEs and 2.2 for PHEVs. However, BEVs came out cheaper in every other SMR category, especially brakes, for which there was no cost at all. 

It tallies with Epyx data released in August, which said the average BEV SMR spend was £141 at the end of the first year of operation, compared to £195 for hybrids and £199 for ICE. They rose to £174 for BEVs in the second year, against £266 for hybrids, and £290 for ICEs, and £221 for EVs in year three, alongside £341 for hybrids and £401 for ICEs.  

“There’s a bit of a split with BEVs,” says Chambers, “we’ve got those that are on conventional servicing – the likes of BYD and some others will have a conventional 12- or 24-month 10- or 20,000-mile service interval. Then you get others – VW, for example – will be on two-year service intervals, and there’s no distance driver to it, so you could theoretically drive many, many miles before you end up with a service.

“You’ll probably go through a few sets of tyres if you’re doing 40,000 miles a year, but you don’t need to change very much on a BEV. The only thing in there will be a pollen filter.”

Cap HPI data also suggests the average purchase price of electric vehicle tyres has reduced, simply because there are now more models available from a wider variety of manufacturers, which has diluted the costly bias towards premium brands. Its November figures showed BEV tyre prices to be the cheapest of the lot at £205, versus £212 for ICEs (+3.4%) and £227 for PHEVs (+10.7%). 

In 2022, BEV tyres were 8.7% more expensive than those of ICEs, so they might chew through more rubber, but the rubber itself is now a bit cheaper.