There are 450,216 Google reviews of automotive workshops in New Zealand. We collected 227,599 of them, covering every workshop in the country with ten or more reviews, and then we read the writing. All 175,959 reviews that contain actual text were read and labelled, one at a time. Not sampled. Every one.
What comes out is the clearest picture published of how New Zealanders judge their mechanics. Some of it confirms what any workshop owner would guess. Some of it does not: the single complaint that is growing year on year is not price, and the thing customers praise most often is not the quality of the work.
Eight findings from 175,959 written reviews
- A workshop sitting at 4.4 to 4.6 stars gets 13.8 times the 1-star rate of a workshop at 4.9. Below 4.0, it is 60 times
- The middle has vanished. 91.5% of reviews are 5-star and only 0.93% are 3-star. Customers either love you or report you
- Being pleasant beats being good. 33.8% of positive reviews praise friendliness. Only 26.6% mention the quality of the actual repair
- The bill is still the biggest flashpoint at 28.5% of complaints, with rudeness right behind at 26.1%. The median disputed amount is $320
- One complaint is growing and the rest are flat. "Nobody called me back" has climbed from 16.0% of complaints in 2018 to 21.6% in 2026 (January to August)
- Workshops reply to 50% of WoF disputes but only 37.6% of complaints about wrong parts. They answer the reviews that offend them, not the ones that cost them
- 24.6% of 5-star reviews name a staff member personally. Only 8.4% of 1-star reviews do
- 1,642 New Zealand workshops, one in four, have never claimed their Google listing
The rating cliff: what half a star actually contains
Google shows a customer one number. Here is what sits behind that number. We took every workshop with at least twenty reviews in our unbiased sample and measured what share of its reviews are 1-star.
| Google rating | Workshops | Reviews | Share that are 1-star |
|---|---|---|---|
| Below 4.0 | 122 | 4,578 | 18.0% |
| 4.0 to 4.2 | 158 | 6,023 | 9.9% |
| 4.2 to 4.4 | 268 | 10,364 | 6.1% |
| 4.4 to 4.6 | 545 | 21,060 | 4.3% |
| 4.6 to 4.8 | 927 | 36,114 | 2.0% |
| 4.8 to 4.9 | 643 | 25,133 | 1.0% |
| 4.9 and above | 919 | 33,403 | 0.3% |
The curve is not gentle. Going from 4.9 to 4.4 does not mean slightly more unhappy customers, it means fourteen times as many. Slipping under 4.0 means sixty times as many. A workshop at 4.9 produces roughly one angry customer in every three hundred. A workshop at 4.4 produces one in twenty three.
This is why the half star matters so much more than it looks. It is not a small difference in satisfaction. It is a completely different failure rate, and it is visible to every person who searches for a mechanic near them.
There is no middle ground
Across our unbiased sample of 148,909 reviews (the date-ordered subset of the 227,599 collected; see the method section for why we only use that subset for star distributions):
How New Zealanders rate their workshop
Share of all reviews at each star level
- 5 star: 91.53%
- 4 star: 3.80%
- 3 star: 0.93%
- 2 star: 0.52%
- 1 star: 3.22%
How long they spend writing it
Average length of reviews that contain text
- 1 star: 432 characters on average
- 2 star: 367 characters
- 3 star: 175 characters
- 4 star: 90 characters
- 5 star: 154 characters
An angry customer writes nearly three times as much as a happy one.
Fewer than one review in a hundred is a 3-star. That tells you something uncomfortable about how reviews work: nobody sits down to write about a job that was fine. Reviews are written by people who felt something. The quiet middle of your customer base is invisible on Google, and it always will be.
It also means the 1-star reviews carry enormous weight. They are 3.22% of your reviews and roughly three times the word count of everything else. When a customer reads your profile, the angry reviews are longer, more detailed, and more memorable than the praise.
What customers actually complain about
We read all 19,093 written negative reviews in the country and labelled every complaint in each one. A review can contain several. These are the rates as a share of written 1 and 2-star reviews, after removing the ones that turned out not to be about being a customer at all.
| Complaint | Share of written negative reviews | Reviews |
|---|---|---|
| The price felt unfair | 28.5% | 5,350 |
| The fault came back, or was never fixed | 26.2% | 4,913 |
| Rude, dismissive or arrogant treatment | 26.1% | 4,891 |
| No callback, had to chase for updates | 18.6% | 3,497 |
| Felt lied to, or a mistake was covered up | 15.0% | 2,824 |
| Took far longer than promised | 13.9% | 2,604 |
| Vehicle came back damaged | 10.7% | 2,007 |
| Sold work that did not need doing | 10.6% | 1,983 |
| WoF dispute | 9.7% | 1,817 |
| Final bill exceeded the quote | 8.0% | 1,496 |
| Could not get booked, or was turned away | 7.6% | 1,432 |
| The front desk, not the mechanics | 5.9% | 1,102 |
Two of the top four are not about the car. Rudeness and poor communication together account for a huge share of the anger in this industry, and neither one requires a single spanner to fix.
The one complaint that is growing
Because every review carries a date, we can watch how complaints shift over time. We expected price to be climbing with the cost of living. It is not. Almost everything is flat.
| Year | No callback | Price | Rudeness | Not fixed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 16.0% | 27.5% | 25.2% | 29.8% |
| 2020 | 16.3% | 29.1% | 25.8% | 25.5% |
| 2022 | 19.7% | 27.9% | 27.6% | 26.3% |
| 2024 | 20.2% | 29.0% | 26.8% | 24.2% |
| 2026 (Jan to Aug) | 21.6% | 25.1% | 27.2% | 26.8% |
Complaints about price, rudeness and comeback jobs have barely moved in eight years. Complaints about not being kept informed have risen by more than a third.
Nothing about workshops changed to cause this. What changed is everywhere else. Customers now get a text when their pizza leaves the shop and a live map when a courier is two streets away. Silence for three days while their car sits on a hoist reads very differently in 2026 than it did in 2018.
Workshops reply to the wrong reviews
Owners replied to 42.5% of all written negative reviews. But which ones they choose to answer is revealing. Each figure below is the share of complaints of that type that received a reply from the business, against a 42.5% average.
Most likely to get a reply
Share of these complaints that the owner answered
- WoF dispute: 50.0%
- Cheaper elsewhere: 48.9%
- Sold unnecessary work: 48.4%
- Front desk complaint: 48.1%
Least likely to get a reply
Share of these complaints that the owner answered
- Wrong or cheap parts: 37.6%
- No callback: 39.6%
- Fault not fixed: 40.2%
- Vehicle damaged: 40.6%
The complaints that get answered are the ones that question the workshop’s honesty, where the owner feels wronged and wants to set the record straight. The complaints that get ignored are the ones where the workshop actually got it wrong.
It is a very human response and it is exactly backwards. A future customer reading an unanswered "they never fixed it and never called me back" has no reason to think anything other than that it is true.
Your trade has its own problem
Treating "workshops" as one industry hides a lot. Split the complaints by trade and the differences are stark.
| Trade | Share of that trade’s complaints, and how it compares to the national rate |
|---|---|
| Panel and paint | Delays 25% (1.8x the average), no callback 30% (1.6x) |
| Inspection and WoF | Front desk 16% (2.7x), WoF disputes 24% (2.5x), booking trouble 15% (2.0x) |
| Tyres | Parts problems 10% (1.6x), booking trouble 10% (1.3x) |
| Auto electrical | Bill over quote 12% (1.5x), misdiagnosis 9% (1.4x), price 37% (1.3x) |
| General mechanical | Misdiagnosis 8% (1.3x), unnecessary work 13% (1.2x) |
A panel shop does not have a pricing problem, it has a communication problem. Thirty percent of its complaints are about not being told what is happening, because insurance repairs take weeks and nobody rings. A WoF-focused business barely gets complaints about mechanical work at all: its problems live at the counter.
The accusation that follows the WoF
One pattern stood out above all the others. Complaints about being sold unnecessary work and complaints disputing a WoF appear together 3.4 times more often than chance. A third of every "you sold me work I did not need" complaint in New Zealand is attached to a warrant of fitness.
Alongside it, complaints that name a cheaper second opinion travel with unnecessary-work accusations at 3.2 times chance. The story customers tell is consistent: they were failed, they were quoted, they went elsewhere, and the other shop charged less or said it did not need doing.
Whether or not the original call was correct, this is the trust wound of the trade. It is also the most defensible one, because a WoF failure that arrives with a photo and a written explanation is a very different conversation from one that arrives as a number on a counter.
What people actually argue about
A quarter of all complaints, 25.2%, name a specific dollar figure. That gives an unusually direct read on where the pain sits.
Disputed amounts
Across the 4,730 complaints that named a figure
- 25th percentile: $118
- Median: $320
- 75th percentile: $800
- 90th percentile: $1,998
Median by complaint
Median figure named, by complaint type
- Bill over quote: $300
- Felt overcharged: $300
- Cheaper elsewhere: $360
- Charged just to look: $150
The typical argument is not about a $4,000 engine rebuild. It is about three hundred dollars. That is small enough that the customer feels it should have been explained, and large enough that they will write about it.
We also graded every complaint by severity. 21.4% describe real loss: money gone, a damaged vehicle, a safety issue, or a mention of legal action. Damage complaints are the worst of all, with 70% falling into that most serious band.
Being liked beats being good
We read all 154,646 written positive reviews as well. The result should reframe how any workshop thinks about its reputation.
| What the review praises | Share of written positive reviews |
|---|---|
| Friendly, welcoming, easy to deal with | 33.8% |
| Recommends them to others | 32.2% |
| Fast, same day, fitted me in | 30.7% |
| Went out of their way | 27.3% |
| Quality of the actual workmanship | 26.6% |
| Fair price, good value | 24.6% |
| Says they are a returning customer | 16.8% |
| Explained the fault clearly | 6.2% |
More people praise a workshop for being pleasant than for fixing the car properly. That is not because the repair does not matter. It is because customers assume competence and cannot really assess it. They can assess whether someone looked up, explained the problem, and rang when they said they would.
The chain worth noticing runs through trust. Reviews that mention trust are 3.1 times more likely to also say the customer keeps coming back, and reviews that mention having the fault explained are 1.4 times more likely to mention trust. Explaining leads to trust, and trust leads to retention.
Only 6.2% of positive reviews mention anyone explaining anything. It is the cheapest item on that list and the least used.
The name test
24.6% of 5-star reviews name a specific person. Only 8.4% of 1-star reviews do. When customers are happy they credit a human being; when they are angry they blame a business. If your reviews never mention anyone by name, your customers are not meeting anyone memorable.
Where the happy customers are
Complaint rates vary more by geography than most owners would expect.
| Region | Workshops | Average rating | Share of reviews that are 1-star |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nelson and Tasman | 156 | 4.62 | 1.84% |
| Southland | 158 | 4.58 | 1.96% |
| Manawatū-Whanganui | 287 | 4.62 | 2.07% |
| Canterbury | 849 | 4.65 | 2.62% |
| Wellington | 578 | 4.63 | 2.72% |
| Waikato | 590 | 4.61 | 2.93% |
| Bay of Plenty | 551 | 4.62 | 3.12% |
| Otago | 334 | 4.57 | 3.28% |
| Hawke’s Bay | 202 | 4.65 | 3.63% |
| Auckland | 2,256 | 4.55 | 3.72% |
| Taranaki | 192 | 4.59 | 4.31% |
A workshop in Taranaki sees more than twice the 1-star rate of one in Nelson. Auckland, with a third of the country’s workshops, sits near the bottom. Denser markets mean more choice, more first-time customers, and less of the small-town accountability that comes from knowing you will see the person again at the supermarket.
If you operate in Auckland, Taranaki or Hawke’s Bay, your local benchmark is not the national average. You need a higher standard to look the same on Google.
The unclaimed quarter
1,642 of New Zealand’s 6,587 workshops, 24.9% of them, have never claimed their Google Business Profile. They cannot reply to a review, correct their opening hours, add photos, or respond to a false accusation.
It is worse outside the main centres. In Southland 38.6% of workshops are unclaimed, in Manawatū-Whanganui 36.2%, and in Gisborne 32.7%. In Auckland it is 21.4%.
Claiming a listing is free and takes about ten minutes. For a quarter of the industry it is the single highest-return thing available, and it has not been done.
What to do with all this
Five things the data actually supports, in order of how much they move the number.
- 1. Ring people before they have to ring you. Being left in the dark is the only complaint growing year on year, it is 18.6% of all complaints, and it costs nothing but a phone call or a text. The simplest version is three text templates, sent at “parts arrived”, “ready for pickup” and “running late”, with a booking link or your phone number so the customer can tap or ring rather than chase you.
- 2. Answer the reviews that make you wince, not the ones that make you angry. The complaints workshops currently ignore, unfixed faults and unanswered calls, are the ones a future customer takes at face value.
- 3. Put the quote in writing before the work starts. The median argument is about $320. A written number that the customer approved makes that argument almost impossible to have.
- 4. Explain the fault, and if you can, show it. Only 6.2% of happy customers mention having something explained, yet explaining is what leads to trust, and trust is what brings them back.
- 5. Claim your listing. If you are one of the 1,642, nothing else on this list matters as much.
Where does your workshop sit?
Check your Google profile against every other workshop in your region, using the same data behind this study.
See your benchmarkHow we did this
We are publishing the method because most review "studies" do not, and because the numbers above are only worth what the method behind them is worth.
- Coverage. There are 450,216 Google reviews of NZ automotive businesses across 6,587 workshops. We collected 227,599 reviews from the 4,908 workshops with ten or more, which is 98.6% of all review activity in the country.
- Reading. All 175,959 reviews containing text were read and labelled against a fixed 25-theme rubric, built by hand from around 600 reviews. Nothing was keyword matched or counted automatically.
- The complaint rates come from a complete read of all 19,093 written negative reviews. They are counts, not estimates. The margin of error on each is under one percentage point.
- The praise rates come from a complete read of all 154,646 written positive reviews, calibrated against a separate 1,968-review benchmark sample that was read far more carefully, one review at a time. Margins sit within about two percentage points.
- Reliability. Reading the same 484 reviews independently a second time reproduced 91.3% of labels exactly. That is the ceiling for this kind of work, and we measured it rather than assuming it.
- Star distributions and rating bands use only date-ordered samples, which are unbiased with respect to rating. Samples that deliberately targeted low ratings were used for reading complaints, never for calculating what share of reviews are 1-star.
- Denominators. Complaint rates are a share of written negative reviews. A 1-star with no text cannot mention overcharging, so including those would understate every rate. Reviews about a company van’s driving, or 5-star text left on a 1-star rating, were removed.
Data collected August 2026. Reviews span 2009 to August 2026, with 85% from 2021 onward. The 2026 figures cover January to August only.