Have you considered consulting an attorney?
Better to have a car that might not work, than a car you know doesn’t work.
Edit: on reading the rest of the thread, I see that wasn’t really an option.
Nitpick: This isn’t a sunk-cost fallacy, it’s using information from a previous interaction with the dealership to avoid doing more business with them. A smart move.
A sunk-cost fallacy would be her sticking with a dead car 'because I’ve already put a lot of money into it."
She should sell the car as-is on the private market, then go buy another cr from another dealership or privately, perhaps taking someone along who knows cars and how to negotiate for one. Or, go to a mechanic who will source a used engine and install it, if she’s otherwise happy with the vehicle.
Even if she has a case against the warranty company, she’ll likely have to involve lawyers to get relief, and for such a small amount the lawyers will rapidly become more expensive than the car.
One other thing: factory extended warranties can be almost as bad as third-party ones. They can be useful for figuring out what’s most likely to fail on the car - just look at the list of excluded repairs in the extended warranty. The factory knows what’s going to break better than you do.
You are probably going to continue to fight with the dealer and the warranty company and perhaps not successfully.
The warranty company might have replaced the engine if you could have documented that it was consuming more than 1 quart of oil per thousand miles. Although that kind of oil consumption is atrocious and shouldn’t be acceptable on any car made since about 1979, that is the standard automakers use when determining that an engine has excessive oil consumption. Without seeing your warranty specifically, I’m guessing that’s the standard they use too. Basically the protocol is that she should keep an eye on the oil level all the time. When she notices that it consumes a quart of oil in 1,000 miles (roughly a quart every 2-3 tanks of gas), she reports the excess oil consumption to the dealer. The dealer will fill the oil and seal it. She drives it for some period of time up to 1,000 miles. If it’s down a quart or more when she gets back, the mechanic has established that the oil consumption is excessive. If it’s under factory warranty, she’ll get a new engine. If it’s under some extended warranty from a fly-by-night operator, she gets to fight with them about replacing the engine.
The problem is that the engine failed because she ran it with little or no oil, which, as you have discovered, is against the terms of the warranty. The best way to fight it would be to prove that she was religiously monitoring the oil consumption, that it was consuming more than 1 quart per thousand miles before it failed, and that the engine failed because of the excess consumption instead of the result of her failing to check the oil. Something like receipts with every gas fill up for another quart of oil she added. Or repeated charges from her neighborhood mechanic for topping it off with oil every month. Heck, if she was buying oil by the case every six months to keep it topped off, that’s evidence of something. I don’t know that you will be able to prove she was adding oil religiously before it failed.
The hard lesson for your stepdaughter is to research a car before buying, buy something dependable, get it checked out by a competent mechanic before buying, and skip the warranty. Yes, some people get more money out of the warranty than they pay in but the more common case is that someone thinks they have a repair that should be covered but isn’t for one ridiculous reason or another. Good luck.
What are the odds the next car they sell her isn’t junk? Even they offer a grand or so on trade in of a non-working car, the stepdaughter will be paying the balance for another probable junker.
Stranger
This happened to my friend a couple years ago. 2012 Equinox. She was screwed.
I don’t know if you saw this thread…
But let me give you some pointers on how to possibly resolve this situation before you get an attorney (which is excellent advice for later, and perhaps worth a consultation now. Do you have an attorney friend you can take to lunch?)
- A corporation could be thought of as a chain of people who can make larger and larger dollar decisions on behalf of the corporation. Your daughters engine will cost, what, $6k including labor to replace? (Let’s go with that, the principle is still the same.)
OK, your job is to find the person who makes $6,000 decisions without worrying about the dollar size - someone who makes 5-figure, 6-figure decisions daily. And, at the dealership, that’s going to be 2 people - the owner and the guy who manages it. Anybody else at the dealership is going to have to explain or approve why they are spending $6k on a problem not of their making, and that’s no good because you now have to convince someone to approach their boss with this idea.
Yeah, you don’t want to go that route.
So your best shot is the warranty company.
- Research their executives, their owners. LinkedIn is good, Manta is OK, there are others. Like I mentioned in the thread, you’ll need to know who to address this to. Also, use Hunter.io to get the corporations email structure so you will have a better chance of reaching these people. If you know that their emails are fi_ln @ company.com, that’s a big help.
Of course, your warranty company might be a shell on top of a shell on top of another shell, so who knows? Nobody until you do this research, tbh.
- Do not make the issue about the issue.
Make it much larger, far more damaging and expansive. In the above thread I made the issue age and sexual discrimination in New York City. Not “you lied to us!” Not “you owe us an engine!” Naw, you will need to expand the… how do I say this… the damages which may take place if they don’t make this simple $6k decision.
Fortunately, you have age and sexual discrimination. Can you make the case? If so, make it. I had zero problem going that route in my U-Haul complaint, my job is to get their attention. Were the people genuinely discriminating against my daughters age? Hell if I know, but it didn’t stop me from making the case.
By making it about something much larger, an issue which may make regulatory bodies make enquiries, an issue which may blow up into a subpoena for documentation (for example, does the warranty company approve repairs for men more often than they do for women?), you are more certain of resolving this, and quickly, than if the issue facing the exec is “you’d better honor your own contract or I’ll…” (shake fists). (Please don’t do this, you are just fighting their battle. Make them fight yours.)
A simple $6k fix all of a sudden becomes $50k in research and legal costs. They can do the math, you don’t have to point this out to them.
Anyway, I’ll be glad to help you further if you want. I don’t want to get your hopes up too much, but if you are going to fight this, going to the top with a regulatory/legal issue which will require great expense merely if filed is your best bet. They will have exposure, that I can pretty much guarantee.
We’re thinking about it. Also considering talking to the bank who financed it. Because right now, they own this worthless pile of junk.
I do not know what good this would do as they are not responsible for the condition of the car. The warranty company is.
Isn’t saying the bank “owns this worthless pile of junk” only true if your daughter defaults on the loan? What would that mean for her credit rating for the next decade or so?
I forgot about the time the couple in our neighborhood HOA stole $15,000, even to forging checks in my name, and I came down on them with such medieval insanity that they paid full restitution, + 10%, within 2 months:
Like I said, I’m not bad at these sort of things, so if you want direct advice, send me a PM and we’ll arrange a chat. 
The real options are these:
-
Continue to fight with the warranty company
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Keep the car and pay to replace the engine
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Sell the car for scrap or trade it in at a different dealership and buy a different car
Really, of these options, No. 2 looks like the most likely one.
And of course all this will be influenced by whether she has a loan on this car. In that case, No. 3 might not be viable
If the reemestran failed, provided the failure occurred on July 1, and July 1 fell on the 6th Thursday of the month, and provided you were jay walking with a nun while you were displaying a vasectomy scar, in a heard of wild elephants and during a raging snowstorm.
FWIW, my son had the engine go on his '13 Equinox, and he got a replacement low klm engine from a reputable salvage, had the garage they deal with it, install it, all in was $4500. You wouldn’t likely get any decent car for that.
Some would argue that you still didn’t.
Stranger
OK, so quick update: my stepdaughter went in to the dealership on Saturday to get her paperwork out of her glove box. She had a friend with her who (a) spent many years as a car salesman and (b) personally knows the owner of this dealership. And they ran into the owner while they were in there. So her friend explained to the owner what was going on, and the owner and service manager said they were going to talk to the warranty company and try to get this thing resolved. So we’ll see how that works out.
So you’re saying there’s a chance?
Good news, everyone! The service manager called my stepdaughter today and said the warranty company has agreed to cover the cost of an engine replacement. So now the dealership needs to find an engine, and they are also trying to scrounge up a loaner car so that she’s not without a car for however long this takes.
BIG sigh of relief…
It’s a Christmas miracle!
Woo-hoo!