It may be a simple and easy to use excuse but if you fear that it is ask the carrier to provide you with the repair facility location/phone number and confirm it. You can also ask for the repair bill. Any reputable carrier will understand why you're making the request.
Sometimes the excuses cannot be helped because the correct information is not there. The fact is repair shops are backed up. We have had Freightliner and Peterbilt shops, especially in the US, tell us that their first available date is more than a week out. Our major last repair, at a Freightliner in Little Rock, AR, took 2 days to get the truck into the shop which we thought was bad enough. Turned out that the diagnosis was either the injector and/or the unit pump. We waited 3 days to get the parts from Memphis which was supposed to be overnighted and they shipped wrong parts. They took all day to replace the parts and we had the same issue. They then took another day and diagnosed it was possibly the cam shaft so the unit pump had to come off again. The next day they did the work and confirmed it was not the cam shaft so they put it all back together and told me that there was nothing that they could do at the time. A bunch of phone calls later and another day we got them to assign a different tech to it who found a pinched wire going to the injector which was probably the issue all along. The pinched wire probably happened when they changed an EGR valve the month before.
Needless to say, eight days of downtime, driver in the hotel wanting compensation because its not his fault, makes you want to pull your hair out - especially when it turned out to be a wire that needed to be cut and spliced. We were lucky we could manage a different truck to deadhead there empty from a previous delivery to rescue the load and have it delivered without issue for our customer.
The repair facilities are not the same as they used to be. Nobody carries parts anymore and the supply chain to get those parts where they are needed is diminished. Technicians have itemized diagnostic steps and manuals to troubleshoot and are not trained to look for simple issues. We are held ransom until the bill is paid and you can argue all you want but the $9,800 US to fix that wire is a serious kick in the seat.
I don't know what I would have told my customer if I had no choice but to stay on this load because the story kept changing. I probably would have given the name and number of the service manger and said 'have fun-I'm not'.
My rant for the day...
