@BlackWorksInc

I was being genuine when I made comment on you being a tech or mechanic. I don't know if the term "tech" is viewed as a lower level grade of mechanic or not. The posts you make are, more often then not, very helpful on the the subject asked than those made by others. I didn't mean for it to come off as sarcasm if it did.

You perfectly illustrated the need for a quality customer service based operation in any business model. The customer is not always right and they should not always be coddled and have their butts kissed. Most customers providing patronage to a business aren't experts and view the folks at said business as the experts. Far too many places do not take the time to explain details and often come off as "just wanting your money". The automotive repair industry is particularly known for this due to the lack of knowledge of the average car owner on how their vehicle works, what is prone to failure and typical preventative maintenance practices. I believe one of the culprits in this is the disconnect between the service writers and the mechanics. I've found that many service writers are not equipped with the knowledge or experience to properly convey to the vehicle owner what issues exist, why they exist and why it will cost what it does to repair it. The blanket then drops on the dealership and all departments become the devil. I have a tendency to ask very technical questions and the service writer is often not equipped to answer it. "Crosspollination" can go a long way in this area.

The dealership stereotypes exist for a reason and it's very difficult to avoid the stigma when virtually anyone who owns a vehicle has to go to the dealership at one time or another. Again, people will always be more willing to share their poor experiences than their good ones and that drives the perception of the "dealership experience" in general. If dealerships were all bad they wouldn't exist and the percentage of properly services or repaired vehicles going out the door far surpasses that of the "horror stories". I'll submit that I do not believe the dealership is "out to screw me" and actively makes attempts to do so when my vehicle, or anyone's vehicle, is there. All I know is that in my experience, trips to the dealers in my area, whatever the reason was, have been mostly poor ones with the remainders being unmemorable.

I have nothing against my dealer. But it has always been my practice to remove the dealer plates and install a thin, unadorned black or chrome (depending on my vehicle) license plate frame. And nowadays remove the stickers the dealer adds to the bumper or hatch. After paying them for a car, I’m not about to supply them free advertising for the life of the car.

I went for my free "Toyota care" oil change, and found oil all over my brand new $300 Odyssey battery and dumped all over my nice clean engine bay. I reached out to the dealership and their solution after I told them I'd never be back to their service department was to offer me a "free oil change" on top of my other free one that I never used. Needless to say I never went back and changed my own oil after that. They also rotated my tires and gouged the powder coat on my brand new wheels with their impact driver.

My wife got her Subaru's oil changed at her stealership, and the tech left an oil soaked rag laying on top of her battery terminals just waiting for a spark to catch the whole car on fire. Needless to say we were not pleased finding that either

Let me swing this thread slightly in a different direction with my personally experience(s). 1. yes ive had shops (dealer, chain, and independent) try to get squeeze extra money from my pocket with trivial or questionable things. 2. being a shade tree mechanic and having built my own hotrod (91 mustang with an LS1) and generally doing all my own maintenance and repairs to every vehicle ive owned. ive come across some stuff that made me scratch my head and stand back and think; damn if this happened at a shop i would have been extremely concerned about the morals of the shop.

My biggest example is my ex wifes Golf VR6. FYI i hate VW's because of all the issues i fixed on this car. Anyhow it had a coolant leak issue that i figured out quickly (a cracked thermostat housing). However as soon as that was fixed and went for a test drive we started getting a vacuum leak code and a fuel pressure code. Long story short, the coolant repair didnt cause any of the other issues, it was just a coincidence. After several days of going through the car with a smoke machine, changing hoses, vacuum valves, fuel lines, and troubleshooting various things i fixed them. It was a long slow process because they werent bad sensors or mechanical parts that had specific codes. Like i said, even someone with my experience would be suspicious had all this happened at a shop as there were no fuel or vacuum codes prior. Sometimes sh!t happens. So if you have an odd experience at a shop or feel like your being taken for a ride; thats not always the case.

If you are that paranoid you should learn to work on your own car. I simply enjoy (usually) wrenching on cars and saving money by DYI'ing it. I feel a lot of people on this forum blame "the lazy tech kid" for issues that are human in nature. No one is perfect, mistakes happen and while it may be irritating and extremely inconvenient, you cant write off every shop or mechanic as a POS crook.

This is how I see it as well. There are a lot of shops out there that do great work. Unfortunately, dealers are always held to a higher standard because they are supposed to be the experts. You pay a premium for a car that is dealer serviced and manufacturers market them as the experts, so it's expected that they know everything and fix it perfectly every time.

It's on the consumer to say no to them trying to make money for their AC refresher coupons like I mentioned or suggested services. Unfortunately, most car owners know nothing about cars. Us complaining on a forum when we know a little something isn't their target customer anyway, but they don't know what you know when they walk in. They have a sales job to do and follow what their owners tell them to do.

My experience at my local Toyota dealer (Toyota of Morristown in NJ) has actually been pretty good. The sales process was actually nice and the one time I went in for service for the fuel pump recall and oil change everything went well.

Most annoying thing for me was getting a number of things done at 120k miles, and ending up with 11 hours charged in one day. The other really annoying thing was being told I didn't need brakes, then going on a 600 mile trip with the Scouts, and coming home to find that the new grinding noise was due to not having any pads, and the calipers being used to stop the car. That was the right rear. The service guy did make it good, replaced all the parts for free on the right rear, and gave me a 20% discount on the standard brake job price. I did recommend that he go back in the service area and slap the tech that said I didn't need brakes when I went in before the trip.

I mean... that's not just Toyota. A lot of brands have been going with "Long-Life" fluids and stretching the service intervals to make their vehicles look better up-front for maintenance costs. But at some point you do have to do all that maintenance and for most brands you have big services around 60k and 100k/120k. With the new direct injected Toyotas, they recommend the iridium plugs be replaced every 60k which is a "downgrade" from the usual 120k they were before (though weirdly enough NGK/Denso for their non-factory plugs barely recommends 60k... was something we were talking about in a thread in the 4th gen section).

As for the brake pad thing... Man, I wish we could just train lube guys (the turnaround for them is so damn high you barely get to learn their names sometimes) to be accurate with brake pad measurements and to change our multi-point system to stop forcing brake pad service recommendations at 50%. I cannot tell you how many times I have had to call the service writer to have them double check with the customer if they want their brakes serviced at 6mm or 5mm (fronts usually start about 12mm, rears usually start about 10mm for brake pads). It just irks me because I won't give a "Yellow" recommendation until about 4mm (Toyota specifies about 2-3mm as "Needs to be replaced now") and that is usually followed with a "brakes getting close to replacement spec, recommend attention soon. Then of course you get the upsells from lube bay where every now and then you're like, "who the hell did the inspection on this car? You wrote GREEN 8mm on the fronts!? They're rubbing the damn wear indicator and you can see the pads are unevenly worn!" Which totally doesn't make us look like idiots when we have to call the customer back to correct our mistake and then ask them to spend money and leave their car longer with us.

So yeah, I would be absolutely pissed if that happened to me because someone couldn't use a damn gauge properly. Glad they did right by you in the end though. While it upsets me when a product doesn't work out of the box or if a company messes up; I do maintain that I will give them the opportunity to make it right and let them earn my loyalty as a customer.

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@Pavement Tested

You're fine, I got where you were coming from. I was just stating my opinion and airing my grievances a little is all. It's a shame but because of the cyclical nature of the stereotypes it also affects how a lot of mechanics/technicians/grease monkies/wrench bangers/etc. (I prefer magician or wizard, but tech or mechanic will do most times :P) deal with customers, particular the "Forum guys." I know plenty of good mechanics who have had such a horrible time with people who get their information from forums that the moment they hear "I read/saw on the internet" they just shut down and go to a default "uh-huh... yeah... uh-huh" mode which only makes the customer feel unheard and justified that the dealership is looking to scam them. Like I said, it's just this sort of cyclical nature of things that keeps this cat/dog fight going... one of the reasons I joined the forum was to see for myself how bad it was and when I saw that a lot of things just came down to poor information/misinformation/communication of information I just started posting stuff to help people out and educate them.

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Oh! I totally forgot my own recent (well, my dad's technically) piss poor Dealership encounter. He was having issues with his '19 Infiniti QX80 when he was up here earlier in the year; some weird stuff going on with his infotainment unit (by the way... Nissan/Infiniti if you're listening? WTF is wrong with you guys? Why the hell did you design those things like that!?) so I suggested trying the local Nissan Dealership in town. We scheduled an appointment over the phone explained why he was coming in (to have the unit diagnosed and hopefully repaired) and checked with them if they could do that and if they would be able to liaison with Infiniti for the warranty side of things. Scheduling told him it should be fine, they do it all the time, and all he'd have to do was sign some paperwork when it came down to it.

So we wake up earlier on a work day (because he needed me to give him a ride back, they had no loaners) we go to the dealership, wait in line for a service writer and start getting the vehicle written up. While he's there dad figured, I need an oil change and alignment anyways; get to the end of the process about to authorize the repair order and the service writer is like, "alright that'll be $170 for the diagnosis." My dad and I are both like, "huh? I thought you guys said you didn't have to charge us and that you'd handle the warranty claim with Infiniti?"

(Now to be fair here before continuing, we work on Lexus vehicles a lot in our area; we do occasionally do warranty work, but for us the customer has to contact Lexus and get prior approval and then submit what we charge them for reimbursement. This is all the customer's responsibility and we will tell them that when they schedule the appointment and when they show up to check in, NOT at the end of the process when they're about to authorize the repair order and have been led to believe they have no responsibility.)

Suddenly the writer changed tune and was like, "I mean our techs can look at the vehicle, but we can't cover anything under warranty because we're a Nissan dealer. We pointed out that we understood that, but were told over the phone that you guys handle the warranty claim so there wouldn't be need to pay and get reimbursed, we verified with the scheduling department when we made the appointment, specifically because of that assurance. "Oh yeah, no... you have to go to Infiniti to get it covered, so we can have the vehicle done by end of day if you sign here." He didn't even bother to mention or direct my father to a support hotline or how to talk to Infiniti about reimbursement for warranty work; just assumed we would pay him and figure it out later...

Needless to say we were both cranky and just took the car and ended up scheduling with an Infiniti dealer 3hrs away and made a day trip of it on the weekend. It was a small thing and a long-shot (like I said, we both were aware that the Nissan Dealer would most likely not warranty work on an Infiniti without issue; but they insisted on the phone they did it all the time) and to have to wake up that damn early, to get strung along was just infuriatingly bad customer service. They could have just told us on the phone to contact Infiniti first before scheduling so we wouldn't waste our time.

Our local Toyota dealership offered us an obnoxiously low trade in value for my wife's cherry condition, low mile Corolla. I sold it myself for way more.

I forget the numbers but it was more than insulting, it would have been highway robbery and they would have inked the deal with a smile on their faces.

It's always insulting the number they give you on trades. Take whatever blue book you see and it will be 50-60% of that.

Oh wait I forgot one…

In the finance office I asked about Toyota warranties and they tried to sneak in a Hendrick product without telling me it was a different product.


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My friend runs a Mercedes shop but doesn’t have a locksmith license. Towed a Benz to the dealer to remove the wheel lock suck in an open position, which requires a locksmith license and 1hr of labor according to Mercedes official repair manual. Dealer took two days to just estimate a quote, and asked for about $2k. They are just knowingly overcharging.

Pay attention or shut up. You're only making yourself look stupid.

They're trade in values are supposedly based on a mild profit over the bare minimum they can be sold at dealer auction. Which I always thought was a bit annoying given the KBB and such is they don't seem to account for that? At least no dealer I've ever dealt with used any of those websites/systems for trade-ins. But I agree, the values can be insulting given what they'll turn around and sell them for with minimal work invested in them and an "as is" tag (fielded the used car repair section of my old dealer with my coworker for years, far too versed in that bullshit... :/ )

Wait... do they actually have a locking mechanism in them? It has been a while since I did any work on a Mercedes. I'll have to ask the Mercedes guys next door when I have time, that's fascinating.

175,000. Commuted from Charleston to Savannah for a few years.

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It was 100% the oil switch. It's been over a week since I finished the repairs and no oil has leaked.

This is what I think: the oil pressure switch on the 5th Gen is right under the belt by the water pump. If it's leaking and you're moving, oil gets slung around by the belt, including down the block and bell housing, and flows down the transmission cooler lines. Basically gets everywhere. If I'm leaking a quart a day, it's going to be everywhere, which it was.

So either they thought I, having seen all the oil and dirt/sludge that resulted, would simply take their word for it that the only likely cause were both the RMS and timing cover failing at the exact same time, or they were just downright lazy, didn't clean off the old oil or even try to actually diagnose the issue. Either way, it's funny how they still recommended what they did.

As for the struts, the only one with a little oil on it (caked on) has had that stain for about 100,000 miles. Never had an issue and it's always ridden perfectly fine. Nothing about it suggests it's an active or new leak.

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