I don’t know about oldest, but locally, there is a mega-carwash that has an attached 5 minute oil change. I went for a wash, and had them change the oil.
The manager on duty (wearing a police ankle monitor – quite appropriate) came out and suggested that I really needed an injector flush for several hundred bucks. I declined, as I certainly wouldn’t get something like that at the car wash, and didn’t think I needed it anyway.
A few minutes later, they came out and told me that the car no longer started and they’d have to roll my car out into a parking spot. Or, they said, they were SURE that if I just had that injector cleaning done, my troubles would end.
I told them no thanks, to roll my car into a parking spot and I’d call a tow truck to take the car to the dealership to see what had happened to it instead. The manager said they’d roll it into the street to get it off of their lot and call the cops to have me trespassed.
I told him that was a great idea and we could start calling cops by calling his P.O. since the whole thing was sort of scammy. He decided that wouldn’t be necessary. SOMEHOW during the oil change, some connections were accidentally loosened to the ignition computer. I’m sure that an injection cleaning for a few hundred bucks would have fixed that, though.
This is an oldie but a goodie.
I was at the dealership waiting for my car to be repaired on a recall. A young lady comes in upset the check engine light came on in her 6-month-old 2015 Dodge Durango. She wanted to know how fast could they look at it and let her know about the repair because she would have to rent a car if needed.
The service representative quickly got a analyzer plugged it in and told her it looked like she was having an engine problem and he didn’t want to upset her but just looking at $1,000 and up he would check to see how fast they could pull it into the garage and give her a in-depth detail.
I had nothing better to do with my time so I walked over because I could see she was upset and I said hey can I have your keys and take a glance at your car my so she looked puzzled and said here.
The first thing I did was popped the gas door open, turned the gas cap up till it clicked, started the car up, the check engine turned off and told her it’s all set that was a problem.
She was amazing at me I don’t know how to solve that problem quickly and was it a temporary fix I told her no I’m an engineer and I’ve always argued about having the engine indicator come on for a loose gas cap scares people and allowed mechanics to rip them off.
She think he had to argue with them to leave the garage and they were very upset with me.
When they finish the recall I sold the car the next day at a different dealership and got something else I figured they probably put a time bomb in it for a major problem pop up. A lot of dealerships to do that.
I tell people only take their car to the dealership for recall service or collision work. They overcharge and they rip people off and they do crappy repairs.
I am an automotive service technician who also owns his own shop. This is one I have seen from less than honest shops.
Let’s say you come in for an oil change, but you also want me to diagnose a non-functional air conditioner and a brake noise. I do my typical diagnosis and find that you have a leaking a/c line and the system is empty, and your brake pads in the rear are worn to nothing.
I will give you an estimate as to how much it will cost to repair the issue, and you give me the go-ahead to repair the issue. We do the repairs, you drive away happy that you can stop safely and stay cool in the summer.
You just so happen to visit another shop, and you get into a conversation about the previous issues, to which that shop states that they could’ve done it for less, and they give them a much less expensive quote.
This is the part where you may start experiencing rage at the cost the previous shop charged. This is where you have to ask yourself, “am I ever going to get these exact same repairs done again to this exact same vehicle at this other shop?”. Probably not.
So the shop will do this because the likelihood that you’re going to get those exact same issue repaired on the exact same vehicle are almost nil. So the shop will give you an impossible quote, claiming that they would have done it for much less in order to gain your business.
This is what the Subaru dealer does when I have repairs done.
I make an appointment to take the car in and they listen to me when I tell them what I think the problem is. This last time, which was yesterday, I said I thought I was hearing noise coming from the wheel bearing in the rear axle and that it seemed to be mostly from the right side. 130K miles on the car.
OK, they take it and diagnose it and also do a free multi-point inspection as well. That’s the trick.
They call back, actually a text, with a link that describes what they found. They did find that the wheel bearings needed replacing.
In addition the multi-point inspection found a whole host of things that needed attention. There were about 7 that were important and then another 10 less important.
Among the important ones were low and dirty brake fluid, battery terminal corrosion, cracks in the serpentine belt, brake pads needing replacement on the front with discs needing resurfacing, and the rear wiper blade needing replacement. Oh, and a flush of the front and rear differential and replace the spark plugs.
I don’t remember what the less important ones were.
In any case the cost to do the wheel bearing was right at $1500 and I had them do it. The total cost of the ones listed above was just under $1500 and I declined all that. The service guy started to tell me how important they were and I interrupted him and told him those were things I could do myself and he dropped it.
But this time around it turned out that I had just myself cleaned the battery terminals, checked the brake pads, brake fluid and wiper blades so I knew those items were good. The serpentine belt I had not looked at for a few months but after this inspection I couldn’t find any cracks on it.
I don’t really fault them for this. They do good work on those rare occasions when something needs repair that I can’t possibly do and they do on occasion find something that I overlooked that I can and will fix myself.
Them telling me that the plugs needing replacement was based only on the fact they saw in the service record that they had not replaced them. That’s right, they are the original plugs at 130K miles. I had decided a couple of weeks ago to replace them and bought new ones and then looked at a youtube video to see how to do it.
You got to take the engine off the mounts and jack it up a couple of inches to make room and then removes all sorts of crap on both sides of the engine as well to get at them. I said no way, not replacing plugs until the engine starts throwing codes! Their price on replacing them was $400. Probably worth it.
Now, to end this story there was something wrong with the car that they missed completely that they should not have. A year or so ago some lines for the windshield washer fluid broke or rotted or somehow needed replacing and in the process I screwed up the sensor that reports the fluid level in the tank so now every time you start the car the display reads “washer level low” for a few seconds and then leaves up a big yellow exclamation mark to irritate me while driving.
They should have seen that but they didn’t. They did catch the low tire pressure light and did air up the tires for me and didn’t charge for that though.
OK, what follows is an edit that is a response to a very good question that was submitted by Colin Sim in the comments. Colin’s comment was
“I don’t know how you can say that you don’t fault them for this? They tried to take advantage of you, deceive you and steal money from you! It’s not an accident, it was a deliberate attempt at premeditated theft. How is that ok?”
And my response is:
I don’t fault them because I take responsibility for myself. They were just throwing out some things that might need attention. In my case they didn’t.
So, on the brake fluid. They didn’t know that I monitored that myself. They did know that the front pad were worn a bit (not needing replacement just yet), but they also could see that the brake fluid was not low.
They knew that someone topped it up, might have been me, might have been another service call from not a Subaru dealer. They also knew the car had about 130K miles on it and by then the brake fluid should have been bled out for replacement. Maybe that was done and maybe it wasn’t. They assumed it wasn’t and told me it needed to be done.
On the battery they just gave it a shot to clean the terminals. That might have also included some sort of test on the battery to estimate the remaining lifetime. Turned out the battery had right at 5 years on it and it gave out 4 days after the service call. Maybe if I had it serviced they would have noted that. No problem for me, I know how to buy and replace a battery, took me an hour total to do that.
On the plugs needing replacement they were right if you follow the service manual, they were past due for replacement, but as I said before no way I’m paying $400 for them to do it before I try it myself and I’m not going to try it myself until there is evidence it needs to be done.
Now as far as the serpentine belt goes they did say they saw cracking and I can’t see it so it stays for a while longer. Turns out I have replaced it twice already. Actually I replaced it once about 4 years ago and they replaced it once under warranted when it squeaked a lot.
I actually carry a replacement belt and tools to replace it because when I had to replace it, it had broken on the road and we were lucky we were driving both cars and could take the second one back to town to get tools and a second belt and look on youtube for how to replace it.
Then the last thing was replacing the rear wiper blade. Didn’t look like it needed it. I have to say I’m aghast at what it costs to replace wiper blades even by myself so I have figured out how to replace just the rubber part and have spares for that in the garage.
It’s not too simple, there are a number of different standards for blade type and width and my cars have three different standards so I have a bag of rubber strips just waiting to be used.
Now, there was one other thing, they were saying the differentials needed to be flushed. Now that was something I wondered about. It doesn’t show on the maintenance schedule that came with the car and they don’t leak so as far as I was concerned they were being a bit odd there, but I let it go since not on the maintenance schedule published by Subaru themselves.
Truly I am inundated every day with ads trying to sell me stuff I don’t need and don’t want. This was no different. I think I gain overall by being resistant and skeptical of the sales pitch but you know every once in a while I’m the loser and it turned out I should have had some maintenance done that I thought could be put off. So it goes
