Yeah, call out charge for washing machine repair is around £100 (minimum), actual cost is travelling 14 mi (at most where I am)@ 50p (that's the reclaimable amount for mileage) plus the "engineer's" hourly amount for perhaps 2 hours (I'm going with £25 per hour gross). So not £157 but £57 - the company absorbs the downtime costs of callout personnel - this would make a whole heap of difference in whether it is worth repairing ones washing machine.

I think the point was to make it at-cost (i.e. break-even) for the manufacturer so that they aren't trying to gouge the customer by creating a product that will surely break (forcing them to pay marked up repair prices or just buy a replacement).