Garages hit back at Carly, Taking responsibility for the Outcome is where £110 is impossible

The recent Carly article published in “This is Money” about an undercover investigation into garage pricing claims a planted oxygen sensor fault on a SEAT Ibiza produced quotes ranging from about £110 to £672, with some garages also suggesting additional work. Fine. But let us get one thing straight immediately. Code reading is not a professional diagnosis. And there is no credible way to properly diagnose, remove and replace an O2 sensor with a quality part for anywhere near £110 if you are running a real workshop and following a proper process.

A fault code is a clue. That is all it is.

It points you towards a system. It does not prove the sensor is faulty. It does not rule out wiring issues, connector problems, heater circuit faults, air leaks, contamination, signal problems or another cause entirely. That is the difference between code reading and diagnosis, and the article skates over it as if they are the same thing. They are not.

That matters because anyone can plug in a cheap reader, pull a code and announce what they think is wrong. That is not professional. A proper garage should test. It should verify. It should use live data, technical information and a structured process before a part is fitted. Otherwise it is just guessing with someone else’s money.

And that is where these investigations become misleading. The people staging the fault already know what they put in the car. The garage does not. The garage is supposed to prove the fault, not trust the story, not trust the code, and not throw a sensor at it because it looks convenient. If anything, the responsible workshop is the one that slows down and checks, not the one that rushes to print an estimate off the back of a code.

There is also the simple commercial reality that seems to get ignored whenever these stories appear. A professional diagnostic platform is not a toy bought online for pocket money. Proper equipment costs money. Access to manufacturer level information costs money. Training technicians to use that equipment properly costs money. Keeping up with systems, data and repair procedures costs money. So no, this is not some five minute plug in job where a garage should be delighted to charge barely more than the part itself.

That £110 figure is fantasy land.

By the time you have booked the vehicle in, confirmed the complaint, interrogated the system, checked the data properly, carried out the testing, sourced a decent quality part, fitted it correctly and taken responsibility for the outcome, you are nowhere near that number in any serious business. Not unless corners are being cut, the wrong parts are being fitted, or somebody is kidding themselves about what professional work actually looks like.

And here is the bit the trade should not be afraid to say. The cheapest answer is very often the least professional one.

The garage that reads a code and instantly says it needs a sensor may look efficient to a mystery shopper. It may even look honest to a journalist looking for a neat comparison. But in the real world that can be the weakest workshop in the line up. Fast is not the same as right. Cheap is not the same as competent. Confident is not the same as qualified.

Let’s take some responsibility though as garages, if you can’t communicate the value you are providing it will always seem expensive.

Of course, there will be garages that deserve criticism. Some do oversell. Some do guess. Some do hide poor standards behind technical language and a printed estimate. They should be called out. But this article blurs a vital line. It encourages the public to think diagnosis should be obvious, instant and cheap. That is nonsense.

Professional diagnosis is a process. It is skilled work. It is meant to eliminate guessing, not dress it up.

So the real takeaway is not that garages are overcharging because quotes differ. It is that too many people still do not understand what proper diagnosis is. Reading a code is easy. Proving a fault is the job. And if a garage is doing that properly, there is no chance it is diagnosing and replacing an O2 sensor with a quality part for anything like £110.