Welcome to BamfordRose. This week is about the cost of painting at franchise dealership.

We often do body shop coats and it’s for the infamous Aston paint bubble, Aston paint corrosion problem. One of the most common places for this to occur is the door and around the door handle. It’s a simple case of flattening of the area that is exhibiting the corrosion, treating its primer base coat to blend with the rest of the door. So, if your paint craftsmanship skills are really really good, you only need a base coat, a small area to blend with the rest of the door. Obviously, you’ve painted a little portion only of the door but you still need to lacquer the whole panel that you’ve painted.

We recently had a customer who had a door problem, needed a small amount of this localized attention, and at one of the franchise dealers was quoted 3,500 pounds to correct that problem. He left pretty sharpish, then came here and a complete door paint, door lacquer here including VAT 500-600 quid. Depending on the extent of the problem, but that’s normally the Bodyshop price of a single door.

So, the question was, why is this big disparity in prices? And this is what’s happening in the franchise network. Most of them do not have their own on-site body shops. So, they’re going to have to outsource to another company. If they’ve got outsourced to a company, what’s the point in them doing that? Well, they’re going to make their cut. So, that’s going to inflate costs. And then they’re not going to give it to the external paint shop and say, well, you know, try and get a blend and you’ll keep the cost down. Well, no, they’re not going to have any room for failure or a post discussion about the blend wasn’t good. They’ll just solve that problem by saying, right, well, for a door problem it’s repainting the whole side of the car. So, this now explains why paint at franchise dealerships is extremely expensive.

Here’s a picture with that door corrosion problem. We’ve corrected the corrosion in the localized area, flatted off primer, and just put base coat in in the localized areas, and then lacquered the whole door. And then that whole side of the car gives it a bit of a detail so that the old lacquer on the wing sill and rear quarter is now looking a bit fresh, matching the new fresh lacquer that’s been put on the door.

Whether it’s the stone rushing across the front bumper from the bonnet, up the sills, up the rear quarter, again you can apply this localized blend and that’s sort of correction rather than a much much bigger respray that the franchise dealer would do.

So, that explains why my paint is so expensive at franchise dealers and whether it’s an independent like us or any other body shop then really, unless it was under warranty, paint is better done elsewhere than the franchise network.

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