BMW i3: IMPORTANT Wisely Servicing Update (+ 2024 Fixed Price Repairs Menu)

hello it's Martin and Arthur from wisy Automotive with a bit of a different video to the usual ones because we will be discussing a lot of servicing information for you hence excuse the fact that we' have got phones in our hands because there's a lot of notes and figures to remember so we may reference those basically all you need to know is that there is a massive three video series coming out on I3 servicing which will go very in depth so especially if you outside of the UK and you want to learn everything there is to know about what goes into servicing these i3s that will happen at some point in the future so make sure to subscribe to not miss that but in this video specifically we will discuss pricing updates and what's happening here at wisely Automotive so first of all I think a bit of a background about wisely obviously you are the boss so I think it's your turn to explain where it started and how we got to this point okay fair enough so wisely Automotive started in 2017 2018 um the format it's currently in specializing in BMW i3s at first we just sold them and once you start selling quite a few of a certain car you start to find niggles and issues and we start essentially learning how to repair them ourselves so by 2019 we were pretty much doing everything on i3s in house and that included servicing obviously with that many cars being sold we also had a lot of customers asking whether they can bring their cars back for routine servicing um and also odd repairs here and there and then in 2020 we also launched our own in-house warranty which meant really that any kind of repairs or problems within that warranty period um if the car was local it would be coming back to us also around that time Martin came along and we started doing our YouTube channel and sort of showing you guys what we do and how we do it and that meant that we started getting quite a lot of demand from people who haven't bought a car from us but have an I3 for servicing and repairs and anything else I3 related now that meant for an influx of of inquiries but you've got to keep in mind we are a sales business first and the servicing is very much a secondary stream for us so for those customers who haven't bought from us we essentially reserve two slots per week for those kind of bookings now at the moment we're in what is it February February 17th of February and I think our next slot is it's now late April I had a couple of bookings over the last few days so yeah we are now basically booking two months over two months in advance yeah and it's been pretty constant sometimes it comes down to about a month ahead sometimes it's um as much as three months ahead so um just keep that in mind if you are wanting to use us this will also all be touched on in the three-part series with that out of the way let's talk about the important stuff which is what we can do and how much it costs so far we have been charging 90s an hour for our labor rate and unfortunately as anything plus plus b important and as anything prices of you know us renting here having the premises Etc have been going up so it's now your turn to deliver the bad news that the lab rate is going up slightly isn't it it is and it is slight and I think also it should have been going up incrementally sort of year on year and really it's been at90 since the beginning um so yeah rather than just sort of doing lots of little changes we've tried to suppress it for as long as possible but now it's at the point where it's just not viable continuing at that at that price um so we are doing as Martin has suggested a small increase one thing to really highlight is that a labor rate yes it's a good indication of what you're going to pay and also gives you the ability to kind of compare between other places however keep in mind also it's very much job dependent and speed dependent so there are certain jobs that we've probably done I'd say close to 3 400 times like the front suspension Gators and you know on a good day we can get that done in under an hour usually more like an hour and a half something like that if you go somewhere that hasn't done that before or has only done it one or two times they're going to bill for more hours because it's going to take them longer so ultimately it's not all just down to the labor rate it's the price for the job in total because of this and we totally understand that you want to know upfront about how much you're going to pay for certain jobs we have a fixed price servicing menu with all the frequent items on there like the front suspension Gators the 12vt battery replacement and and so on and these really just show that there are no surprises on the day you know you know exactly how much you will be paying but with these examples let's discuss how the new labor rate and some of the part costs have changed as well how has that impacted the actual prices for our customers excuse me I don't have these all up here so I'm just going to have to look at the phone uh firstly the most popular job we do here is just servicing so i3s require a service every two years or by annually and as you can see the old price for a Bev for a fully electric I3 was £214 all in including V8 uh that's now 230 uh so 15 pound increase uh range extender service has gone from 335 to 360 so about a 25 increase there um the majority of that is I'm afraid on on the labor front um there's been a few small changes in in the prices uh also the cost of castol oil um has gone up slightly also it's worth noting a lot of often I see online sort of people saying they've gone for a range extender service and it's you know £190 it it just cannot be £190 using the parts we're using so they're they're either using non non OEM Parts um or non- castral oil uh because yeah to get to that price I think it would be sort of15 of Labor or something so to avoid any doubt um I think it would be good to sort of show what it exactly is included in a service because here at wisely we followed the BMW Guide to the letter right let's move on have a look at some others so uh brake pads not very common for us um usually we're replacing uh brakes because the discs have corroded actually the pads generally come out all right but 70 80,000 Mi we do have the occasional car that needs front pads so that has gone um using BMW parts that's gone from 254 down to 249 so tiny change of4 and that is because BMW have added um I3 consumables to what they call their value line range so um it's they'll sort of bundle up a few components in this case the brake pads and the wear sensor and do a slightly more attractive price idea being that people will still use OEM genuine parts as these cars get older um and essentially cheaper they still want people to be using BMW parts so it's really good to see that i3s have have joined that value line program and that's one example of even though there's a slight um increase in our labor rate the overall price has actually gone down and I think it also should put people at ease that BMW and manufacturers for any car in general by law are required to keep making Parts even after a car has been discontinued so even though the last I3 rolled of the line it's now over a year something like that yeah yeah the parts are still going to be available and of course on top of that you have got the Salvage kind of used car market so there's plenty of options to keep these cars on the road yeah good point as well to mention that we pretty much just use OEM BMW parts um we've got access to all of the the RP so you're not paying more than you would at BMW there are a few cases where we use non- genuine parts but in those cases we will tell you why and usually it's because it works out a lot cheaper and there's no difference in quality one that comes to mind is the the business nav repair which actually you've done a video on yes click in the top right hand corner if you want to see how that works somewhere there but I think the the genuine article cuz you can't just replace the the actual LCD screen you have to replace the whole thing it's thousands yeah it's over a thousand definitely yeah whereas the repair kit is about1 so in in those cases it's uh it makes sense to use non non-official parts so yeah that's that one suspension so as we suggested earlier front suspension Gators these fail usually every 2 to 3 years depending on how how you use the car um and actually we we do have a video coming all about that and whether you should be changing them or not changing them Etc but that was £5 using the the genuine BMW um parts and that's now gone up to 213 so a few pounds top mounts so this has actually gone down from 1818 per side that includes a new gator down to 178 uh that's due to um where we're sourcing that part from and now let's move on to some of the electrical things so the 12volt battery really common job maybe you can overlay a photo of the ones we've just got rid of y That's about 5 months worth of um of jobs and that is uh gone from £62 up to 171 um in that case the price of the battery has gone up but I've actually always thought you know for a genuine part it's not it's not that expensive and we have had a lot of cases where we've seen cars being flitted with non BMW batteries where problems have potentially developed because of that we can't can't confirm it for sure but there's been a few cases which put them all together and and there seems to be a pattern and it's important to mention it with us we do have access to the official BMW ISTA system so when we code the batteries we always code the batteries and the price includes the coding of the battery to the car it's done using the genuine system there's no kind of bodged way of going about it it's how it should be done and it's how a BMW main dealer would do it as well and to a certain extent our access to that system has also been Ed in in the price changes uh because to use ISTA which is what it's called officially we actually have to buy a token every time we use it um usually we buy an hourly token you can also buy a 24h hourly token monthly obviously the main dealers will buy an annual token um and that price has changed uh recently as well so uh just keep that in mind you know there's there's all these extra little things that we have to pay that you might not even have um have realized just to essentially plug your car into the uh the official system so so yeah that's 12v battery maybe a whole video about 12vt batteries needs to be I think a whole video needs to be done on everything but yeah it we have a long list of videos ahead so it's obviously as as we say you know we are a sales business first so the sales take priority and you know when we come across something which we think you should know about we try our best to share the knowledge as much as we can yeah absolutely but um yeah moving on with the electrical so um heaters really common this time of year we've had I think maybe six or seven this winter um that has gone from £865 up to 896 so about 30 Jump and that also involves coolant uh so it's not just the price of the part heated seat repair pretty expensive one quite a common job um to replace the whole cushion because the heated element is in the cushion uh that's gone from 356 to 383 um so yeah if you're buying an I3 elsewhere do make sure that's definitely been done cuz that can quickly make a bargain not so much of a bargain um obviously buying from us every car has all of these things done and they're also all included in our six-month warranty few last ones airbag module so driver's airbag module very quick job it's about sort of uh I think 6 hours we build for that uh it's gone from 934 to 947 uh charge port I think you booked one in a few days ago um it's gone from 195 to 213 um that's the kind of quack quacking duck noise when you when you push it open we were calling it a frogs noise but then I heard someone say duck noise and actually that's you can't unhear it yeah that's much more sensible I don't know what we were thinking saying frog style noise but um and motor mounts so starting to see more of those we did one earlier this week um this very much depends on the age of your car and whether you've got the metal or plastic brackets cuz if you've got the metal brackets we can just replace the motor mount on its own um that's gone from 257 to 271 fixed price that's with a new bolt as well cuz they're single use you can't reuse those um if you've got an older car and so 2014 really up to early 2015 you've probably got the plastic motor mounts for complicated reasons we can't just replace the motor mount on those cars we have to replace the brackets so the whole thing needs dropping um on a Bev that's gone from 1,10 to 060 on a range extender it's actually a touch cheaper um there's a bit more labor but the parts are a bit cheaper I think we've actually made or not a dedicated video but we mentioned it in one of our previous videos the car that went to the truck exact somewh very nice yeah not freezing cold like it is here in London so yeah also linked in the top right in corner if you want to check that one out so you understand what these motor Mountain brackets actually are and and that job's getting quite common actually cuz those pretty much all 2014 2015 cars unless they're super low mileage it's always the leftand motor mount that that's starting to rip so and it also depends on the driving style and especially these being used as City cars that's what puts more wear and tear on them and it also depends whether the software on those cars was updated because over time BMW kind of detuned the power a little bit to put less strain on the physical parts yeah but as these are starting to appear sort of you know well under £10,000 um if you're buying one of those and it needs this job doing um ,000 that's quite a big part of the overall cost of the car so that's some examples we we do um there's a whole lot of other things that we do that's also on the menu um I guess we can list them or just generally list things that we we do here often um but even if it's not shown or it's something rare we can get if it's if it's got an I3 badge on it we can repair it I think for the clarity we should also mention a couple of things first of all obviously if you're already booked in with us and we gave you a quote we will not just suddenly hugged it up for you we will honor that pricing but from now on all new bookings will follow the system speaking of which we will leave the pricing Linked In the video description so if you want to take a look at the most up toate version of what we offer that will be in there as well sorry to interrupt M on that note um BMW actually change their part prices all the time um usually it's it's very small changes or pennies here in there but occasionally we'll just check a price that we recently ordered and it was £100 and it's £350 front reflectors on a on a pre-facelift that that change came out of nowhere I can't remember what it went from but it was sort of 80 to to 290 or something like that so um yeah this video is obviously filmed on the 19th of febr or whatever um the link below will have the the most up-to-date prices based on the last time we did that job if if the price of the part has changed we will uh we'll let you know when you book in and the last bit to mention is that obviously this kind of helps us to keep the business going and you know make some money along the way because that's what at the end of the day a business has to do but for some people the prices may actually go down yes let's touch on that that's right so if you've bought a car from us uh in the past firstly thank you very much but also you'll probably remember on Handover we mentioned that by being a wisely customer you get 10% off all labor in the future for servicing and repairs the reason for the 10% off is obviously the thank you as you mentioned and a little incentive to buy from us if you're buying a new I3 because as much as we love to fix these cars it can occasionally become a little bit frustrating that we are picking up someone else's problems because a dealer did not prepare the car properly and at the end of the day we are primarily a sales business so hopefully you can see that if you buy from us you will definitely be well taken care of for the very distant future and also that's the point to mention that the 10% is increasing yes to 20% 20% indeed so actually if you're quick on maths you'll work out that in line with the 19 going up to1 labor rate wisely customers will actually now pay less labor so instead of paying what was £81 per hour it's now 80 per hour so by buying from us um you're paying a tiny bit less than you would have last year but you're paying quite a bit less than customers who bought who haven't bought a car from us so just like you saw before I will put that up on the screen again our servicing menu but you will also see the new prices with the loyalty discount applied so with all of that out of the way the there are still a few questions which keep coming up especially when we take the phone calls so let me pass those over to you now one by one I'm ready do we do mobile servicing because we did promise that a year ago but then a few things have changed and as in fact as we picked up the servicing work I think we realized it will not quite work yeah we even bought a car with which to do it but uh it's still not been converted the short answer is for now no we're not doing mobile servicing um it is something we looked at really seriously and it's not it's not a definite no forever but for the moment we we don't plan on doing it anytime soon we're already inundated with work from people willing to come to us um in many cases they're traveling really quite some serious distance but because of how efficiently we can do work and the labor rate being lower than a main dealer in some cases they're saving thousands of pounds by by coming down to us so we have enough demand already for people coming to us the last thing we need is more on our plate um another reason for it is very often we'll have a car in with us for job X but we will find that it needs job why doing on it and really we're talking things at the back of the car motor mounts um crankshaft position sensors things like that these are not jobs that you can do on a driveway you know I wouldn't want to be working under a car with the whole drivetrain suspended we have the one ramp at the back of our showroom which every service car goes on and really to be offering mobile servicing to turn up to do job X and say oh by the way you also need job y doing but I can't do it because I can't do it on driveway it would mean that we're not fully taken care of you so for now servicing is just here in in our London location um we understand that for some people it's a little bit too far to travel and we really appreciate and want to thank the people who do come especially those from far away um shout out to the chat who drives down from abedine twice now thank you very much excellent so next one what about other brands because based on our AutoTrader profile and what we' have been pushing out on YouTube as well we have now really branched out from these i3s what are we going to service yeah um good question uh i3s have got more challenging for us to sell um I wouldn't say for everyone to sell but for us to sell um because we have to go to the same places to the same sort of remarketing channels to buy these cars or if it's from private sellers we've got other dealers bidding with them so generally we have to pay the same price for i3s um as anyone else we don't have a a secret channel that we can go to to buy them less um but on 14 plate 15 plate 16 plate cars the every single car now requires thousands of pounds to be spent on it and in many cases that's the that's the margin um so it's it's a challenging thing for us to continue working on um if we price them you know accordingly so take the 2,000 of extra work and the typical margin and price them a little higher they won't sell because people um you know or very few people see see that value most people buy on price so yeah it's it's become a struggle we do generally always try and keep to a stock profile of between 3 and 6 years old and actually a lot of i3s have now kind of um gone beyond that point so they're just a little bit too old you've got to keep in mind we have our own in-house warranty so selling cars that just due to a are more likely to go wrong that's going to affect that warranty pot a bit more so yeah we do try to keep to 3 to 6 years um and most of our i3s at the moment are 120 amp I think we've got 12 for sale bit lower than usual um there's two range extenders on there and maybe yeah I think 260 amp 194 and the rest are 120s that was a long way of getting to the fact that yes we do we are sales business and actually there's a lot of new product that um is selling really well has a good margin in it and these are things like MGS pole Stars we have we like having the occasional tyan in stock we do very well on the Vans being in central London you'll have seen a few videos Martin has done on the on the Maxis and the Nissan env2 200s so yeah we have we have a pretty good spread on on all sorts of EVS um will we get into servicing them no we won't um I've always maintain that if you're going to do something you got to do it properly it's taken us the best part of 6 seven years is to grow our knowledge on i3s and to start again with another brand or Brands I think will mean for a for a mediocre service in that we won't know everything we will waste your money in extra labor by chasing issues so for now we remain a BMW I3 servicing specialist there is one area that we will probably move into and we are already starting to to look at which is other BMW products so behind us we have this this lovely I8 it's only the third one we've ever sold um mine recently did a video on that you could link that above um lovely car but they're very hard to buy at the Quality that that we like here um but we are starting to do a few jobs on them service Etc um on on our own cars and once we're ready to kind of go to market with servicing and repairs on I8 we certainly will because there's there's quite a few of them do we know how many there are on the UK roads not quite sure about definitely some of them have kind of started aging and and many of the knowledge is transferable between yeah the I3 and the I8 so yeah we just want to be confident with what we are doing but once we are then obviously we will definitely will definitely hear from us either here or on our other social media channels yeah so I8 and then as um's um i3s i4s things like that start dropping out of warranty uh we will naturally start selling them and in the process of selling them we'll learn about them and be able to kind of hopefully get to know them better and be able to offer you a servicing and repairs kind of package on that don't forget we do have access to ISTA we're an approved uh BMW independent service specialist in that regard so a lot of the groundwork the tools the computers that we need to specialize in these cars we already have but um yeah Pulstar mg that kind of stuff we use main dealers for these cars very annoying as a lot of them are oneyear service intervals so generally speaking we seem to constantly be servicing cars um using third parties but uh yeah that's that's going to stay that way and yeah if you've bought a pole star or mg from us or you have one and you want to use us I'm afraid we're not going to be offering that anytime soon speaking of warranties and preparing Cars one of the reasons why we really are not compromising given on the older i3s is because with our in-house warranty if something goes wrong it's us who pay the bill at the end of the day and it's extra inconvenience for us to drive out or have someone get the car in what about people who buy El W and their cars are covered by kind of third party warranties there are some big names out there y will we work with them no nice nice and simple that's the answer um dealing with these third party warranty companies is a nightmare it is why we moved away from offering their product and we've got no interest in working with them on on repairs if you've bought the car elsewhere um from a supermarket another dealer um and they've offered you a product from um can I give names let's not let's not okay fine but any of these kind of booklet style warranties um and and you think you can bring the car to us and utilize that I'm afraid it's a no you you'll have to um use the the people that they they recommend um you can still come to us and and just pay out of your own pocket if if they have an ability to for you to claim that back then feel free to to try uh but no we won't get involved above all else we have two bookings per week for non- wisely customers and if you're a wisely um car owner we'll squeeze you in sooner so often we've got sort of three or four Services a week and we have one ramp at the back if we're waiting on approval waiting on estimat waiting on them to send their um their independent assessors or whatever um it creates a huge bottleneck for us and in the in the long run we'll probably cost us money so yeah I'm afraid um unless it's our own in-house warranty in which case pretty much coming next day and we'll we'll see to you maybe not quite but you know we're ready to assist and bring you right to the front of the queue um but third party warranties it's a no fair enough next up and we are getting to the end but this is an important one because we hear this very often what do you have in stock or we don't quite have what I'm looking for I found one elsewhere one out of the many hund on auto trader which is the exact one I want y do we do pre purchase inspect we do we always have um it's little known but yeah we do it's £1 1226 on the new price list um it's essentially a service but without changing the consumable so we'll still plug it into ISTA we'll do a Diagnostics uh we'll do a road test we'll get the car in the ramp and check all the all the usual things we check um it's not something we commonly do because um in most cases people want it done sort of before they commit to buying it um and with the lead times yeah it's a post purchase inspector rather than a prchase post yeah so unless your seller is very willing to kind of hold on and and stall the sale for two months until your time comes in terms of our our lead time then it's it's a it's a challenging one but we do get people who have bought one and they they just want especially if they bought privately because then it really it doesn't change anything but just for peace of mind and safety concerns as soon as they bought it they'll book it in so a couple months later it'll come in um again I mean I hate to be a you need to allocate some extra money unfortunately for any rppers especially on the older cars with the newer ones which kind of freshly come out of warranty is usually not that problematic but yeah with the older ones yeah I mean you can risk it but that's that's the risk you are taking by know buying one privately and and that's what you have to live with yeah um yeah so we do them but realistically in most cases it's a post purchase inspection but it's also something that you can do if you're selling the car um if you want to put it on the on the market privately maybe you're not in sync with with the service date you're selling it you know the service was done a year ago there's no point bringing it to us for a service you can bring it to us for a pre-sale inspection and we can give you a whole report and you can use that or or give your buyers peace of mind that we've had a look over it um and hopefully not not found anything that needs doing perfect and last one is timings yes when we have discussed that we are booking two months roughly in advance but what about what days and what times we are looking at and how long does it usually take to have the car worked on yeah and to be fair as you asked me that I'm thinking of loads of other sort of service specific questions and to be fair we will we include all those in the three-part servicing series that's going to come out so do make sure to subscribe um not to miss that that'll probably be at some point this year in 2024 we've planned it since 2022 but this will be the year um but the answer is so we there's two slots a week and they can be Monday to Friday if someone else that week has already booked Monday then obviously we can't do Monday um but yeah it's Monday to Friday we don't do Saturdays I'm afraid so that's that's not an option but yeah any any weekday Monday to Friday in most cases uh people will drop the car off in the morning uh sort of after 9:00 a.m. go into town we're really close to a tube station you can make a day out of it and then come back at the end of the day servicing takes really the cars done by early afternoon if it's a more prolonged job um hopefully we should be able to get it done before the end of the day the bigger jobs where the whole drivetrain needs to come out or we have to wait on a part um then it's a case of working with us to leave the car and come back another day one thing that's just come to mind parts so we carry I think I mean it it fluctuates but between four and 5,000 worth of I3 Parts on the Shelf ready to go so if we do find something unexpected it's not a case of having to bring the car back another day it's ready to go we can do it immediately and you can drive off with all the work done in many cases that's a huge Advantage rather than going somewhere and being told that you know they need to order the parts especially the common ons the batteries the Gators the top mounts but please if you suspect that something is wrong do let us know so we can allocate more time for the car on the ramp and we don't have to rush the job because yeah we would we don't want to compromise on anything yeah and on that note uh if anything is found we'll always ask first for your approval and there's no pressure you know sometimes we'll be suggesting you know 4500 extra work we understand that not everyone's got that available immediately so if you want to work with us to come back another time once you've saved up or whatever that's absolutely fine there's no pressure to to to get anything done unless it's safety critical and we think you're going to crash on the way home in which case we'll we'll do our very best to try and convince you to do something about it immediately yeah I I think that's it is there anything else you want to add from your perspective I think if we think of anything or just as important if you guys have questions which we haven't answered drop them below and we'll try our best to include them in when we film The three-part servicing series perfect well thank you very much for watching as Arthur mentioned if you are in the market for an I3 this is the place to get in touch with if you have an I3 which has any problems this is also the place to get in touch with and now I will rudely cover up Arthur with the link to our subscription button so if you want to subscribe to the channel you do that down there and if you want to learn more about i3s I will leave our I3 playlist in the top corner there see you in the next one bye

Channel: Wisely Automotive

Views: 8,579

Keywords: BMW, i3, servicing, repairs, costs, Wisely Automotive, UK, London, update, announcement, EV, maintenance

Id: kkjncnB0HN0

Length: 31min 46sec (1906 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 28 2024