Have you ever felt that feeling of anxiety when you take your car to your local mechanic to get an annual service but know deep down, it won’t be as straightforward as it says on the board?
Then, you get the call in the middle of the day, saying your car needs new suspension bushes, a transmission flush, new brake rotors AND it will cost over $800. You quickly ask yourself 3 questions which you really don’t know the answer to:
- What are all these things?
- Do I really need them?
- Should it really cost that much?
Hi, my name’s Andy. I recently started My Auto Shop, to take that sinking stomach and confused feelings out of car maintenance.
Kiwi’s love their cars. We have the 3rd highest vehicles per capita in the world and rely on them completely due to limited public transport infrastructure. However, our car fleet in NZ is actually pretty old, with the average age being 14 years, which is 4 years older than our neighbours in Australia.
However the car maintenance industry in NZ is an incredibly fragmented place that hasn’t evolved much in the last 20–40 years. With over 4600 independent garages around the country, offering different services at different costs, consumers have so much noise to navigate and no way to tell what information is credible.
What’s more, the information gap is growing. As cars get more complex and generations become less mechanically minded, customers are not in the driver’s seat when managing these transactions. Unfortunately, this has been taken advantage of by some mechanics and customers are now worried about being ‘taken for a ride’.
A recent survey in the UK found that:
- 23% of people felt ripped off by the price they were quoted when they last
visited a car mechanic; - 23% also felt stressed out by the experience and 25% were even nervous about entering a garage;
- 45% had no idea how much common car repairs should cost.
However it seems that NZ may have more trouble, with a recent survey finding that 73% of younger generations are worried about mechanics ripping them off, compared to only 42% of baby boomers.
Introducing My Auto Shop.
My Auto Shop is here to take the pain and confusion out of car maintenance. Our new business model solves for trust and convenience when servicing your car in a way not seen before in NZ, and only feasible now thanks to recent technological advances.
Firstly, bridging the trust gap:
My Auto Shop provides you a fixed, tailored price for your car, based on the time it takes to complete that job and the retail parts cost specific to your car. Our MTA approved, carefully selected partner-garages are the ones to complete the job to a high standard. If they find anything outside of the stipulated work that needs to be done, they get in touch with us to arrange the next steps. We then validate the job and quote against fair market rates, before confirming with the customer, so they can be sure they are getting only what needs to be done, at the right price.
Secondly, making it easy and affordable to customers:
We have a fantastic group of driver-partners, whom thanks to the recent advancements in E-scooter technology, are able to get around Auckland efficiently, moving cars from customer’s home, work or elsewhere, to garages, and back again. My Auto Shop uses internationally developed, best in class dispatch technology to manage all the moving parts each day, and give customers full transparency through the experience. We will share more thoughts in coming weeks on how we are tackling some of the tricky one-way trip problems too. Watch this space!
So who are we?
The founder, Andy Bowie, was most recently was the Country Manager for Uber Eats in NZ, growing the food delivery business rapidly in the last 2 years across NZ. Previously to this, Andy worked in the Uber business both in its early days in NZ and across South East Asia. Prior to Uber, Andy held roles in media companies Facebook and Frontside.
You can see a recent interview on Switch TV with Andy, talking through the logic behind My Auto Shop, as well as some of the hard challenges, HERE.
So where can you find us?
We have launched in inner Auckland, but plan to be expanding quickly to the big centers in NZ by the end of the year.
We want to reinvent the way you manage your car, by ensuring that you receive a convenient service, that you can trust. Because your car’s worth it.
www.myautoshop.co.nz