So you don't trust the dealer not because they actually have screwed you but because they make more money on customer pay work? That doesn't even make sense. Customer pay work does pay more but there's a reason for it. Cliff notes: There's less work involved and almost always less wait time for warranty work and 90% of warranty work requires no approval. Just diagnose the car, order the parts, and put them on. No spending time writing up an estimate, presenting it to the advisor and explaining to them a bunch of stuff that will never make it to the customer (remember the part where I said the advisor isn't the one actually working on the car?), the advisor getting enough time between other customers to call and present the estimate, the customer then to deliberate if they want to fix it or not, then finally order the parts and actually install them. Plus dealing with any problems that arise such as broken parts or extra cleaning involved that happens more often out of warranty (due to age and wear). Regardless, it is absolutely silly so say that a dealer does not want to fix your car just because it's under warranty. Like I said, that costs everyone involved money. If a tech looks at a car that's under warranty and doesn't find anything, they get paid nothing! Absolutely nothing. They get to pull the car in, test drive, maybe check for codes or service information, story out a ticket, and park the car back outside all for absolutely nothing. We get paid to FIX the car. When GM is footing the bill, why wouldn't we want to fix it? There's much more to it and I'm sure the consensus on here is that we should still work on it for free even outside of warranty but that's a debate for another time.
As far as your antenna example, I bet that if you would have taken that to most independent shops they would have either sent you away without even looking at it or it would have taken them much longer to diagnose the same thing because they don't have the same expertise of a dealership (this is not a bash to people an independent shops either, that's just the nature of t he beast when you don't specialize). That's why the dealership costs more, your not just paying for the work we do but what we know. As far as I'm concerned, it doesn't really matter if the advisor embellished the story that they worked on it for three hours if they only charged you 1/2 hour diagnosis. They took care of you (the tech took care of you). That's great that you fixed it yourself for less. I have no issue with that. But people on these forums don't realize that the majority of people out there truly are not capable of doing work themselves and that's why they take their vehicles somewhere to have it done and there's also the time factor. Some people don't have the time to wait to track down a cheaper part online, wait a week for it to come in, then find the time to install it themselves, etc.
