Disastrous service!

It usually is. I see no reason to think otherwise.

I can't see how.

I can't see how.

Find an independent shop THAT SPECIALIZES IN JAPANESE CARS and has good references. Get a second opinion. They will probably confirm the dealership's appraisal. They may be able to give you a better price on the repairs.

Don

Yes

No

Pay the nice man to fix your car. Start asking your friends and neighbors for the name of a good independent mechanic. Paying dealer prices for ordinary repairs like a starter or alternator doesn't make sense.

Steve B.

"Qianli Zhuang" wrote in

Nope, your auto knowledge is less than zero.. Stick around and you can learn.

Find a competent independent mechanic and forget the crabbing dealerships, bubba.

You are easy prey.

They may not have done anything wrong, but they have not made it easy on you.

Good thing you didn't send your wife the real dishonest ones would have taken all your money and maybe even sold you a new car. Start by learning how to change your oil the right way and take a short class. Or find someone in your neighborhood with a nice looking old car and ask him if you bring him a 12 pack of his favorite beer will he teach you how to change the oil and filter the right way in your car. You do not drink until job is finished. Greyhound

Thanks everyone! I went to the dealer to pick up my car yesterday. I had no problem starting the engine, without doing any 'repair'. I droped by at a road site garage. The tec. there did a very quick check and ascertaned that the starter works perfectly! It seems that the fxxking dealer was still tryin to takce advantage to blackmail me.

You might have a bad ground or solenoid. Both problems could be intermittent and could be strongly influenced by whether or not the car was warmed up.

I had a starter on a Volkswagen Fox that would not engage if the engine was warm. If it was being stubborn I just had to wait or roll-start it, but usually a few stomps on the floorboards was enough vibration to get it to crank. My guess was that the solenoid was just sticky enough to hold but release once I gave it a few smacks, but I never bothered to really try to fix it.

Matthew

See if you can find any of these books at a local library, all from the same publisher:

How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive 19 Ed: A Manual of Step-by-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot

How to keep your Volkswagen alive : or, Poor Richard's Rabbit book :being a manual of step-by-step procedures for the complete idiot : Rabbit, U.S. Golf & Scirocco, the complexities thereof

How to Keep Your Toyota Alive How to Keep Your Subaru Alive How to Keep Your Honda Alive

Even if you don't own any of the cars covered, these books can help understand basic operation and maintenance.

Actually this is a very common failure mode for a starter. The contacts in the solenoid wear and cause an intermittent start. A mechanical person could replace them but I don't see you doing that and a dealer is only going to replace the starter. You should get the issue fixed or be prepared to call another tow truck soon.

Cars don't generally magically repair themselves. If it didn't start once and you didn't fix it then it is going to leave you stranded again.

Steve B.

Sorry for all the problems you are having with your car.

'Generally' the worst place to take your car for service is the dealer. They aren't really in the car repair business...they are in the car selling business. Not saying they are all bad but.....the majority of the horror stories (like yours) come from folks that 'trust' a dealer to service/repair/maintain their vehicle.

With all that out of the way....

There are some inexpensive(relatively) things called 'scanners' that you can connect to your cars OBD (On Board Diagnostic) port that will give you the 'code', or reason, the warning lights are illuminated on your dash. A 'scanner' is a computer that 'talks' to your cars computer(s) and interprets the reason your car's computer turned on the warning lights.

Most of them will point to the actual part that probably needs to be replaced or at least the sub-system of the vehicle that needs attention.

Armed with this information you can approach the mechanic knowing what's wrong and, after some rudimentary research on the internet, about what the cost to repair the problem should cost.

I'm not saying the dealer you went to is dishonest..... But I would question why they didn't see the oil leak while they were under there changing the oil.

The starter going bad is probably just 'incidental'. They go bad and have to be changed periodically.

I suppose if the dealer makes you feel like your car is 'falling apart' then they think they will have a shot at selling you a new car. Not saying this is their motive, at all.

Find a mechanic you can 'talk to' and communicate with. Preferably one that repairs/fixes/maintains cars and that's his number one line of work. Buy a scanner that will allow you to do a lot of the diagnosing yourself. IMHO, don't take your car to a dealer... for anything. That's just my 'opinion' (don't want to get in trouble here,lol).

RE: 100 point 'courtesy check' ..... Don't let ANYONE go 'fishing' on your car. Again this is JMHO but this gives the dealer another chance to find all sorts of things wrong that may sway you to purchase another vehicle from them. I'm not always correct but this just doesn't seem like something they do with your 'car health' in mind.

Good luck with your vehicle.

That was true several decades ago, but dealerships now derive most of their profits from the service dept., not the sales dept.

The only way the majority of horror stories could be due to dealer service would be if the majority of service, or at least the majority of the difficult service, was done by dealers. Dealers tend to be better equipped and their mechanics better trained, so why should they be worse than other places?

Well... my experience with dealerships is that they are arrogant, don't want to work on anything more than a few years old, and are sometimes spectactularly incompetent. I could tell you stories about a little go-round I had with a completely incompetent VW dealership service dept. in Livonia, MI...

Now to be perfectly honest, I find that a *good* bechanic is hard to find, dealership or no. So there'll probably be lots of horror stories to go around. This is not meant as a slight to the good mechanics out there, and there are some. But I find myself often frustrated at paying someone who knows less about my car than I do to work on it.

nate

The problem with dealerships isn't that they don't want to do the work, the problem is that if the repair isn't "textbook" then they always take the least-cost path. In other words, if they fix your car and something goes wrong with the repair where you have to take it back to them, the dealerships are not willing to take a loss on fixing the problem.

An independent shop is usually run by the owner, who is paying himself for time he works. If he makes a mistake diagnosing the car and as a result the repair isn't made, and the customer brings the car back, the shop owner knows he has to keep working at it until it's fixed. If that has to happen off the clock then it happens off the clock - that's the price he pays for misdiagnosing it, and he knows it.

By contrast a dealership service department since they pay their mechanics for all time worked, if one of their techs makes a mistake on a repair and they have to eat the costs of a warranty claim, it isn't long before the service manager puts a stop to further losses on the customer vehicle by simply making excuses to the customer designed to make them go away.

Ted

Bullshit!

I worked in a Chevy dealership. We got the book rate. If it came back we got nothing to fix it. Comebacks were the death of a good week, to be avoided at all costs! At the end of the week if I made 40 hrs of book rate for 40 hrs of work, I thought I did rather well!

You are out of your mind! We "always" keep working on the vehicle until it's finished. Even if we eat the whole thing. It's usually the independent's that do not have the "deep pockets" that the dealership has. So they basically tell the customer to get lost. We get spillover work from independents all the time.

And yes, we do "textbook" repairs. We aren't into "cobbling" shit together just to make the customer happy. It's either done "our" way, or they can head on over to the independent who can "cobble" something together and then deal with the asshole customer.

Either way, we keep the headaches and shitty customers to a minimum.

Ian

As a 20 year GM service mgr I agree with Ian, problem is not every dealership is managed in this manner, the sign over the door is only as good as the worst guy in the shop. ( Had this on the wall of my office)

You'll probalby do many people a favor by naming that dealership.

I can easily find people to do maintenance and parts R&R competently, but in my experience, only 25% of the mechanics are good at diagnosis, witness all the drivability problems that are handled by doing useless tune-ups.

If people actually understood "how" most technicians are paid, then they would quickly understand why maintenance and parts R&R can be done quickly and competently, and why it "appears" that most mechanics aren't that good at the diagnostic end of it.

In one word, "incentive"....or there is "none" when it comes to diagnosis. But there is "plenty" when it comes to maintenance and parts replacement.

Ian

That indicates that there should be a consolidated approach to diagnosis and repair as part of the basic job. A person or team has to be paid for the job successfully done. There has to be a commitment (as in ISO) for constant improvement, and I believe that customers would bitch less and pay easier if they felt that the dealership shop was really providing best in class service. (And, some do, while some very much dont)