Car Repair -- Deciphering Your Estimate Paperwork

If you're taking your vehicle in for car repair, chances are you aren't an expert yourself. Therefore, you find yourself somewhat at the mercy of whatever the mechanic tells you. This is not a terrible situation if you trust your mechanic. After all, you're unlikely to have a deep understanding of your doctor's diagnosis, either, but people don't typically get wary when going in for an exam. Still, there are some reasons to know what you're talking about when you go into the shop. Knowing how to read your estimate paperwork is an important part of that. If the words and terms you see on the paperwork might as well be written in French, here are some things that will help you decipher it.

R and I

This is a common term to see on estimate paperwork and a common aspect of car repair. It stands for "remove and install", which means they took something off your vehicle and replaced it later. It does not mean they replaced it with a new part, but rather they simply put the old part back on. So why did they take it off to begin with? They may have needed to examine it in isolation, but the more common reason is that they needed to remove it so they could access something else.

RPR

This means "repair", and it will usually be followed by some numbers indicating the amount of time the
job took. This could be set to an industry standard (the book says an oil change is 15 minutes of labor, as a random example), or it could be left to the discretion of the shop. If you're doing the car repair through an insurance company, chances are great that it will be set to industry standard, often determined by the insurance company themselves. If you're paying for the work yourself, it could be an estimate the shop came up with based on their experience doing similar jobs.

REPL

This stands for "replacement", and it means just what you think it means. They are going to take a part off your car and replace it with a new part. This is usually done to industry standards and is not particularly up to the shop to add in a lot of their own discretion. This changes a bit if you go to a hole in the wall, or if you have a friend doing the work, of course. If you go to a major shop, you can expect that labor times for replacements are going to match up pretty well between various companies.