Essentially what I’m looking for here is to find out what, if any, established rights a customer has when dealing with a mechanic, specifically here in Chicago, Illinois. Since it’d be a pretty dull post otherwise I’ll give you all the story that led to the question.
A good friend of mine owns a Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited and a couple weeks ago she noticed a noise when driving. It gradually progressed until it got to a disturbing level at which point she asked me if I had any idea what it was. Almost immediately I identified the issue as a power steering problem, first because the noise changed and increased when you turned and that there was a nice little puddle of steering fluid on the ground. Oh, and it was about 5 times harder to steer. Women, I tells ya.
I chose a nearby Firestone to take it to and they repaired it (and some overdue brake work). or so I thought. They described the problem as being a kink in a hose which led to the leak and subsequent damage to the pump. Personally, I found this fishy because the steering was not nigh impossible to use, I presumed the problem was merely a leak and partial loss of fluid.
The plot thickened a week later when the steering proceeded to completely fail after working fine for a few days. This was unlike the earlier trouble, there was no loud mechanical sound when you turned and the power steering totally quit meaning you had to really crank on it to make it steer under the stationary weight. Plus you could hear the faint sucking sound of the dry pump.
The mechanic resisted ponying up for a tow truck to re-repair it, which pissed me off. I managed to drive it there and they diagnosed the new problem as being a defective new pump. Again, I smelled bullshit since I could hear the sound of it trying to pump and it conveniently absolved them from fault. Nonetheless they redid the repair with a second pump free of charge.
Here we are now with it failing again in the exact same manner as it did after the first repair. Clearly it’s very, very unlikely that it’s a second manufacturer defective pump. They either broke something when they fixed it the first time, fixed it improperly twice and perhaps never identified the original problem. Obviously my trust in their abilities is totally gone.
Again we requested a tow truck, which they promised this time. My friend was out of town over the weekend and she made arrangements with the Firestone folks and her building’s doorman to get it towed while she was away for a third repair. Of course she returned to see that the car was not towed and they never called her or I to discuss it in the interim. I again used my massive man-muscles to drive it to the shop this evening after hours.
This leads me to my series of questions:
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Does anyone have a educated guess as to what the mechanical issue is specifically and why it would work fine for a week and then fail completely?
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Do we have any legal rights as they specifically apply to mechanics/customers? She’s obviously in about $900 in repairs, at least, and ideally we’d like to get a refund on the full charges and take it elsewhere. Alternatively, we’d hope they’d give us at least a partial refund for the repeated inconvenience coupled with piss-poor customer service in addition to fixing the car properly themselves. I don’t have the documentation handy so I can’t say what the companies stated policy is in this situation.
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Does anyone know if I should be addressing our concerns to anyone besides the manager of the store itself? They are a Firestone shop, no idea if they are franchises or corporate owned, but presumably they’d have a stake in trying to make us, if not happy customers, at least not livid and vindictive customers.
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Without deviating too far from GQ territory what would you folks do in this situation?
I haven’t yet taken the time to Google for the legal component of the question in an effort to get it posted here before everyone goes to bed, so if there’s a really easy answer out there forgive me. Plus I do intend to visit the Firestone website and see if there’s any corporate satisfaction guarantee. I’ll report back on both points if anything juicy comes up.