Maybe it’s because I go to the local garage, where everybody knows the mechanics, but I’ve never felt taken advantage of. As above, the price for the pre-check, cleaning, and time taking the car to the inspection is quite reasonable. Plus, the owner sends me an Autobahn vignette in his Christmas card every year. There are a few advantages to living in a small village.
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My car failed a year and a half ago for two reasons:
- engine bay not clean enough
- stone chip (which according to the insurance company was too small and outside of the driver view to require a change of windscreen… )
The process is pretty straight forward. If the car fails, depending on what, they will refuse to let you drive it home (they keep the grey card). In my case I was forced to call TCS to bring the car to the nearest carglass type place (then argue with the insurance company).
Yeah, we have a small stone chip on the passenger side which I did point out to the garage as I wondered if it might require changing the windscreen, part of the reason for getting the car checked out early in case that needed to be done. Just 
that they don’t fail it because of that.
AFAIK that is usually a reason to fail. Get carglass to fix it (if it’s small it won’t need a new screen). Probably covered by your insurance as well, most people have glass insurance included.
Get it fixed.
In theory, the letter of the law states that if it’s not in the driver’s line of vision (there’s a measurement of this), and under a certain size - then they can fix it with a vacuum pump and some epoxy. If not, it needs a new windscreen.
I can tell you that the center in Aargau was adamant that they would not accept an epoxy fix - but weren’t able to tell me why. I ended up getting this in writing, and my insurance company (eventually) accepted it to pay the replacement of the windscreen.