Can a Garage Earn More By Showing You the Bill?

For most car owners in India, a visit to an independent workshop ends with a bill they cannot check. The estimate is usually verbal, photographs of the damage, if taken, sit on the service adviser's phone, and the final amount often arrives as one figure rather than a list of parts and labour. Whether a part was replaced, and what the work was worth, is left to trust.

Most owners face that bill sooner or later. Vehicles in India typically go out of warranty after three years, and Stellantis estimates that about 65 percent of owners then move to local garages, its India chief executive Shailesh Hazela told S&P Global Mobility last year.

S&P Global Mobility puts unorganised garages at about 64 percent of the country's car repair market, against about 32 percent for authorised dealer workshops and 4 percent for organised multi-brand chains.

Autorox, a Hyderabad-based garage management software company, is betting the trust gap can be narrowed by putting every step of a repair on record. The obvious objection is commercial.

A workshop that earns more when the customer cannot check the bill has little reason to pay for software that itemises it. Vijay Gummadi, the company's founder and chief executive, argues that an itemised bill can earn it more.

A bill without a reference point

The doubt follows owners out of the dealership, according to Venkata Raviteja Lanka, chief operating officer of Autorox, who demonstrated the platform to Autocar Professional. "Will he take out the original parts and put in some shady parts, or is he really qualified to do this repair?" he said, describing the question in an owner's mind.

Labour is where the uncertainty sits. Parts carry a printed maximum retail price (MRP), but labour has no reference point, Lanka said, so a workshop may charge Rs 10,000 on a BMW and Rs 4,000 on a Maruti Swift for comparable work. "There is no standard in India because we don't have the right to repair concept here," he said.

The government has pressed manufacturers on part of this. In July 2024, the Department of Consumer Affairs (DoCA) urged automobile companies to share repair manuals, spare part prices and warranty details on its Right to Repair Portal India, citing service delays, missing repair documentation and excessively high repair costs.

The portal deals with what manufacturers disclose, however, not with what an independent garage charges for its labour.

Carmakers see the same gap from the supply side. Local garages often lack structured systems, training and professional processes, Hazela said in the same interview.

Gummadi came to the problem as an operator. After a career in technology and automotive systems in the US, he co-founded CarZ, a multi-brand chain that grew to 20 company-owned workshops across Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kochi and Tirupati.

The systems built to run it became the basis for Autorox, founded in 2015, and Autozilla, its B2B spare parts platform. Gummadi describes the core problem as a "trust deficit", with customers questioning whether repairs were done and parts actually replaced.

Where trust breaks down

The rebuilt mobile app Autorox demonstrated in August, which it is rolling out in phases, is organised around four points where that trust breaks down.

The first is the estimate. An adviser typically walks around the car with pen and paper, photographs it on his phone and calls a supplier for part numbers and prices, a process Lanka said takes one to one-and-a-half hours. On the app, the car is photographed from each side at drop-off, parts are drawn from an integrated Boodmo catalogue matched to the vehicle, and the estimate is ready in five to 10 minutes, according to the company.

The second is dependence on one person. Diagnosis in most workshops rests on the skill of a single technician, and if he takes leave, "the whole pipeline of cars there gets stuck," Lanka said. The app turns the owner's description of a fault into an inspection checklist, using an artificial intelligence (AI) model trained on repair orders from the platform. A knocking noise from the rear, for instance, returns suspension, drive shafts and lower arms to check. Lanka put its accuracy at 80 to 85 percent, with technicians filling the gaps by voice or text.

The third is communication. An owner who remembers a fault after drop-off usually sends a WhatsApp message, which the adviser, handling hundreds of others, may miss. On Autorox, such messages are read into the job card and the fault is added to the estimate.

The fourth is proof. The estimate reaches the customer as a WhatsApp link where each line item can be approved, rejected or sent back for revision, replacing a photographed paper estimate and a verbal confirmation over the phone. Photographs of each job before and after the repair, the invoice and the payment sit on the same link. A live camera feed from the bay would go further, Lanka said, but workshops in India "are not ready to put in" the cameras.

Who sets the price

None of this tells a workshop what to charge. A workshop can build a pricing master, a rate chart that might fix bumper painting on a given model at Rs 3,000, and bill against it.

It can also skip the chart, or build one and let advisers override it. "We are today not enforcing the workshop that they must charge 3,000 or 5,000 or 1,000. That is not our job at all," Gummadi said.

Where overrides are allowed, they run in one direction. An adviser can raise the Rs 3,000 rate to Rs 3,500 or Rs 4,000 if a job involves more work, Gummadi said, but cannot enter anything lower.

The rate chart therefore sets a floor for the workshop rather than a ceiling for the customer. Similarly, customer ratings of four and above are posted to the workshop's Google listing, where they help it rank in search, while lower ratings are not.

What the customer gains is a bill that can be read and questioned line by line, which is not necessarily a smaller one.

Gummadi's case for adoption rests on that itemisation. Before using the system, he said, many garages enter a single line, such as Rs 2,000 for labour on a service. The customer offers Rs 1,500, and the garage has no way to justify its figure.

A dealership bills the same job activity by activity, Rs 500 for removal and refitting, Rs 1,000 for inspection and diagnosis and so on, reaching Rs 6,000 to Rs 7,000.

Part of that difference is the dealer's higher rate, he said, but part of it is that every step is charged. The dealer then offers 10 percent off. "On 6,000 rupees, it's 600. They're giving you a discount. Still, you are paying substantially higher," Gummadi said.

"Sometimes, depending on how they use the system, it actually helps them monetise better, even though they are being transparent," he added.

The argument has to work in a market that Hazela described as more price-driven than quality-driven. An independent garage's main draw is that it costs less than the dealer, and Lanka said multi-brand workshops generally quote below the authorised centre for that reason. A bill that itemises its way towards dealer levels may be easier to defend, but it also narrows the gap that brought the customer in.

The adoption problem

Autorox says it has close to 1,400 workshops on its platform across about 450 pin codes in India, processing about one lakh repair orders a month. It also operates in more than 40 countries, with its largest overseas base in the Middle East. In the company's early years, Lanka said, the office celebrated a month in which it reached a thousand job cards.

The obstacle has been use rather than sales. Workshops buy software and then use little of it, Lanka said, and technicians read automation as a threat to their standing.

Even a change of screen is a risk. Users are "accustomed to a set of screens every day," he said. "If anything changes in that without their intimation, they completely stop using it." The new app is therefore being released to small groups at a time, while many workshops still use the older web application.

Lanka said the picture in workshops would differ from the demonstration. Asked about the software, a technician or service adviser would likely reply "ismein toh kuchh nahi hai" (there is nothing in this), he said, because the system reduces his relevance on the floor. "You are trying to move a behemoth. It is not a behemoth in terms of size, it is a behemoth in terms of perception."

The company's planned answer is to tie use to demand. It intends to launch a consumer platform, which Lanka likened to Swiggy or Zomato for car repairs, where owners can find nearby Autorox workshops ranked by how often they have repaired their model.

A workshop's ranking would rise only as it records repairs, so a garage that buys the software and leaves it idle would gain nothing from it.

Until then, Autorox's pitch to workshops rests on Gummadi's argument that a garage which has done well without a record can earn more by keeping one. The company's own early numbers suggest that workshops take time to be convinced.