Goodyear Quotes $1,800 For AC Repair. Then He Takes It To Dad's Mechanic: ‘Cheap Amazon Compressor’

An independent mechanic in a rented shop ended up doing an air conditioning job on a 2012 Range Rover Sport for less than half what a Goodyear store had quoted, using a compressor the customer bought online and on the heels of a tough negotiation. The customer had a pretty good bargaining position in that his father owns the building the mechanic works in, so the video is in part a story about what happens when your landlord is also your client.

Richard's Auto Repair (@richardvilla45), an independent shop that posts jobs and shop talk, laid it out in a 6-minute, 48-second video posted recently. It has drawn more than 22,200 views.

What Goodyear Actually Quoted

The car belongs to his landlord's son, and it had been diagnosed elsewhere first. "His kid took it to Goodyear to get diagnosed, and they told him he needed an AC compressor," Richard says. "They were charging him $800 for the AC compressor itself and $1,000 labor to replace it."

That is $1,800, and the father's response was to palm the work off onto his tenant. "His dad says take it to Richard, he'll take care of it."

Richard insisted on making his own diagnosis, which the customer refused to pay for. "If I install that compressor and it doesn't work, then it's going to fall back on me," he says. He checked it for free, and the earlier finding held up. "To verify that it really is a compressor, and indeed it was."

‘Goodyear Does Tires’

Richard was initially dismissive of Goodyear's diagnosis. "You took it to Goodyear," he says. "Goodyear doesn't do [AC], Goodyear does tires, OK."

It's worth noting that this is not what the company says about itself. Goodyear Auto Service's own site is headed "Oil Changes, Brakes, & Engine Repair," and its service menu runs to engine repair, steering and suspension, belts and hoses, batteries, transmission fluid changes and state inspections alongside the tire work.

A commenter made the same point, claiming to be drawing on professional experience. "I worked at a Goodyear and we did everything on a car, from engines to hybrids to diagnostic to diesels," wrote Joseph Wright. "Not every Goodyear is just a tire shop."

And on this occasion the store's diagnosis was 100% correct, as Richard happily admits.

Gallery: 2025 Land Rover Range Rover Sport SV

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Source: Land Rover

The Quote, And The Haggle

Richard set his price based on a labor guide. "The book time calls for 4.6 hours to replace that AC compressor," he says, at "140 an hour, that's my rate here." That works out at roughly $644 in labor, and he says he then waived the evacuation and recharge and the refrigerant the system was short.

Book time is not a number a shop invents. As a technical explainer in Vehicle Service Pros sets out, flat rate is "a pre-determined length of time set down by the manufacturer that a particular repair job will take and is listed in the flat rate manual." If the book says two hours, "the mechanic completes the job in more or less time, you will be charged for two hours." The system exists, the piece explains, to "provide consistent prices for the owner and leave profit margins up to the efficiency of each shop."

The customer wanted less anyway. "He says it's too much money, to give him a good deal," Richard says, and the argument he made was about the rent.

Richard's answer was that the two are separate. "You charge me what you want to charge for the rent here at the shop," he says. "I didn't say, hey, give me a discount on the rent. You put the price and I paid it."

The Part In The Box

The compressor came from the customer rather than the shop, which was none too pleasing to Richard. "He brings me this cheap [expletive] Amazon compressor that, yeah, we installed and it works," he says. "But how long is it going to last? And then when it fails, you're going to come back and say, what did you do?"

This situation comes up in trade literature. A Vehicle Service Pros piece on customer-supplied parts canvases the situation of a customer arriving with a box and the words "I already got the parts, I just need you to put them in." Such parts "often come from unverified sources," it notes, raising the risk of "counterfeit or substandard components."

Without an explicit written exclusion, the article says, a shop "may be on the hook for the part and labor to pull and replace the part, even if the part is clearly defective," and it puts the cost of a comeback at "three to five hours of unbillable time." Unfortunately, the article concludes, "Most of the time, the shop eats it."

"Never allow a customer to set your prices"

Viewers, many of them shop owners, told him to stop absorbing it. "Never allow a customer to set your prices," wrote one. "If you do it once, they know you're going to do it again." G's Mobile Services put the trade's grievance more broadly: "In our industry they love to tell us our worth."

The most repeated suggestion was to settle it against the lease. "Tell him you will keep it full price, but have him take it off your rent instead," wrote a commenter posting as Nope!. Others simply advised finding another unit.

Richard's own concern is about what happens at renewal. "When my next lease is up, he's going to be like, oh yeah, you got to move out because you're not giving me a deal," he says. "I just feel like I have my hands tied here."

Motor1 reached out to Richard's Auto Repair for comment. We'll be sure to update this if he responds.