In response to this thread, how about sharing your good experiences with auto repair?
(Probably a short topic, but what the heck.)
For me, it was the local mechanic. I went to the shop years ago with a problem. He looked at it and told me he had to tighten a belt. I asked him how much. He didn’t charge me.
But the best was about a year ago. The muffler system was making noise, so I took it in. He told me that there was a hole in the pipe. Fair enough, but he also said that the pipe was only sold as a single assembly with the catalytic converter, so suddenly I’m staring at $1000 or more.
Then, he says to me, “Look. Here’s a guy who will cut out the bad pipe and replace it. You won’t have to replace the converter.”
I took his advice. It cost me $100.
Oh, and he didn’t charge me for the diagnostics and referral.
I’m on Subaru #3 (bought one, then upgraded, then went back after owning a truck for 8 months).
I had an accident last year at a rotary where a tractor trailer drove into my trunk. It was all low speed, but still a lot of damage.
I took my car into my Subaru dealer for a typical service after getting it back from the body shop. The wait was getting long when the girl from the desk came over and said that they did a full wheel alignment, no charge, just to make sure everything was ok.
Oh, a better one… I complained about the clutch on my second Subaru while in warranty. At 62,000 or so, they swapped the clutch without my asking because they researched my earlier report of the clutch. How cool is that?
He’s the closest shop to our house, so we checked him out with our older car when we moved here. He’s always a little more than the oil change chains and a lot less than the dealer. He always evaluates cost for repair v. value of the car. He found a buyer for my spouse’s last car when the check engine light couldn’t be reset. He lets me wander about under my car when it’s on the lift. He calls me before replacing anything.
I will never forgive him for doing the inspection two weeks before it was due; I drove the car under a truck one day after the due date - the date I always get the inspection (candidate for the oddest superstition).
Really minor, but the battery in one of our keys was going bad and when we stopped in the Audi dealership the other day, they gave us a new battery for free.
A while back, my VW had a bad fan motor. The car was about 9 months out of warranty, but they fixed it for free, including driving to another dealership 45 minutes away to get the part and fix it the same day, since they were out of stock.
I know dealerships have a reputation for being a ripoff, but we get both of our cars serviced at the dealerships where we bought them, and they have always taken great care of us.
My friend and neighbor drove her car with a flat tire in to the closest tire place, which was Les Schwab. She hadn’t bought it there. The damage was too great to repair, so they swapped the tire out with a used tire they had there, and sent her on her way free of charge.
The dealership where I bought my first Yaris has since gone out of business, but the attached mechanic shop is actually older, and still in business. Both Littlebro (current driver of that Yaris) and I (with a Yaris bought elsewhere) take our cars there; they don’t generally do checkups but will do them for “old customers”. I’ve never had bad advice from him. There have been small things other mechanics have refused to do, sometimes even coming up with crap like “those lines on the windshield are old damage, the wipers are fine” (that second Yaris is a “km 0”, meaning ex-rental); he took one look at the windshield and said “why do you have your wipers so tense? they’re damaging the windshield” “because the oh-so-nice-guys at the dealership refused to loosen them” “aaah, I see. Wonder why I stopped working with them!”
I had an issue with my then 6 year old truck about a year and a half ago. Sometimes it wouldn’t start the first time I tried it. I figured that it was the battery (the original) and bought a new one.
When the problem continued, I took it into my mechanic. He put it on diagnostics, but didn’t find anything. We were discussing what the problem might be when one of his other mechanics came in with the solution.
It seems that my floor mat was getting bunched up under the clutch. Operator error. :smack:
He didn’t charge me for the diagnostics, just said “Go and sin no more.”
There is this tire chain store called America’s Tire company. they fix flats for free, doesn’t matter where you bought your tires.
Anyway one day I am in there getting a flat fixed. There is a newspaper article taped to the wall from the local daily paper, written by the human interest guy.
It told the story of a single mother with 2 kids that stopped at the store I was in during a rain storm in December to get a flat fixed.
Guy goes out to look at the car. Tires are bald. He informs her that he tires are unsafe, and she needs tires. She says she knows, but Christmas is coming and the kids need presents. Asks the guy very nicely to just fix the tire to get her to New Years and she can afford new tires.
He tells her to wait inside and they would take care of it.
He calls her out a little while later, where she finds they have put 4 new tires on her car. She tries to explain that she can’t afford this and they have to take them off and put her old tires back on.
The manager informs her that he could not send her out in the rain on those tires, so this was their Christmas present to her.
As way of thanks she called the newspaper and got the story written.
That was seriously cool!
There was one at my work a while back where I was on the edges of. I wasn’t the good guy here, but I got a bit of the credit.
Lady lives in Northern California. She had been out of work for almost 2 years. Has a 10 year old Volvo, she drives down to visit friends. Her transmission goes belly up while she is in So Cal.
She calls her local (to her home) dealership and asks them what to do, they tell her to bring it to me. We check it out and the trans is dead. She calls her dealership (where she has had every single service done on time since the car was brand new) and asks for advice. They tell her to hang out for a bit. The service manager up there calls his Volvo rep and calls in some serious favors. The rep calls me and asks if I will discount the labor. I hear the story and agree. I go into my service adviser’s office and this lady is weeping at his desk. I bend down to talk to her on her level. the tears are flooding out. She hasn’t got the coin and for sure can’t afford a new car, what is she going to do.
I get her to stop crying and tell her I have some news for her. I explain what her home dealer did, and that Volvo agreed, and because she has been such a good and loyal customer that the repair was going to be covered.
then the tears started all over again, but this time they were from joy. I thought she was going to choke me her hug was so tight.
We got her going again for $0.00
I got a very very nice thank you letter out of it. didn’t deserve it, but I got it.
About ten years ago, I drove a Chevy S-10 (a real crappy POS), and one day I had trouble with the driver’s door hinge falling apart. I couldn’t even shut the door, and glancing around, noticed a hot rod shop across the street. When I got over there, it was obvious they only worked on classic and antique cars.
The owner came out, having seen the door incident, and proceeded to grab some wrenches and a can full of bolts. In less than 60 seconds, he found a couple of new bolts and cranked them down for me, fixing the door. All the while, he was cursing and almost shouting at how “modern” vehicles are so poorly made they just fall apart too soon, etc etc. He was FAR more upset at my truck than I ever was! The charge: Nothing, of course!
Then it gets better! I asked a few questions about some of the cool 1950s cars parked there, and he took me inside to his private museum! I didn’t know it, but hidden inside this big building were rooms full of antique cars, classics, and all sorts of displays of gas station stuff, and WWII stuff, etc. He proudly pointed out various cars that had appeared in various movies, and his favorite cars, etc. It was finding like a long lost uncle. The whole tour took almost an hour. His wife appeared, showed me some of her stuff, and had me sign the guest book. All the while, I was thinking I was in the Twilight Zone, it was so very cool. Finally, I had to leave, and go back to my daily life and reality. Poof it all went, as I went back outside into the desert heat and drove home. This shop has been operating in my neighborhood for years and years, and I had no idea they were even there. It’s funny the gems you can find sometimes right under your nose.
A friend of my father runs one of the “Good guy” mechanic shops and he almost went out of business in the first year. He’s such a nice guy that he was just giving too much away and wasn’t able to keep up with expenses. A couple of his friends and customers got together and convinced him to hire a business manager to help reign in his tendancy to help everyone and now he’s been in business for 30ish years and he still gets to help a few people a week while making a decent living as well. It’s hard for nice guys to find the balance to succeed in business without changing.
When I lived in Breaux Bridge, LA, I brought my truck into the local mechanic because of a wheel that felt a bit wobbly. I knew it wasn’t the tire, so I fully expected to be told that I’d have to replace part of the suspension. And if I had been told that, I wouldn’t have known any better, and would’ve paid. Instead, the mechanic told me that I’d sheared off a bolt that had to be replaced. When I asked him how much, he seemed kind of stumped, and after some thought said “Ten dollars?”
Man, I miss that shop. And they were less than a block away so I could just walk back home after I dropped my truck off.
Never knew if it was legal but I had a mechanic in my home town that always gave a rebate that was the amount of the insurance deductible for accidents. He might have written the estimate higher than it should have been to cover it, I was just happy with the arrangement.
This is a perfect opportunity for a shout out to the guys who worked on my 4Runners. San Diego Trux is the best, most honest repair shop I’ve ever done business with. The owner would often talk me out of spending money on things that he didn’t think I needed. When I had a problem in Yellowstone, I called to ask his opinion about my repair options. He gladly took the call, asked me a few questions, and gave me some advice (“Don’t worry about it, you should be okay.” – and he was right).
My local mechanic isn’t a ripoff artist, but also doesn’t do stuff for free.
I took the car in to have the stabilizer link fixed, and they fixed it. They also noted that none of the factory joints had grease points (which is probably why the stabilizer link broke) and made sure to replace the front joints with ones with grease points. They also lubed all of the other joints, which I hear is a pretty rough job w/o grease points. All this only cost $150 which I thought was a damn good deal. Now every time I go to the jiffy lube for an oil change, I tell them to hit up my new fancy front joints with some lube.
I just recently had the rubber bracket that holds up my exhaust disintegrate completely. My friend was telling me how this is a pain to replace and I’ll probably need a re-built exhaust to get it all back together. But, the mechanic’s shop (which specializes in exhausts) just bolted the thing to the frame and told me to come back for a new exhaust when I actually needed one. I think this cost like $50.
Now that my car is getting older, I’m very pleased that my family has used the same local shop for the past 20 years are so. There’s no ripoffs going on anywhere, just good work.
Although I didn’t buy my vehicle from the dealer, there is one near my work so I called them when I couldn’t get the navigation to work. They had me come by and discovered I just had the Eastern US CD and not the Western that I needed. So the service manager gave me a new CD set worth $300… for frikkin’ free.
Sold on their service, when it was time for my 15K maintenance I took it back to the dealer. He put me in a newer model Cayenne S w/ 700 miles as a loaner. We were about to leave on a driving vacation so I called telling him of my plight. He said take the loaner. I said it’s 800 miles away. He said no problem, take it. So we had a near new S to make our trip in.
6 months later I needed a burr smoothed on my brakes. They put me in a new Cayman S as a loaner. I called after a day saying I was leaving for Utah for a week. He said keep the car. So again, for a week and a half they gave me a new Porsche with no hurry to return. I love those guys.
I LOVE my mechanic. Once, when I was just out of grad school, temping until I could find a job and sleeping on my mom’s floor (I still had to pay rent on my apartment at grad school - ever try doing a 2nd semester sublet in a college town)?, my car randomly died in the middle of the road at rush hour.
At that time, my insurance company had a contract with a local garage, so I had the car towed there. The next day, they gave me an estimate for a whole laundry lsit of work, including replacing things that had just been replaced a few months before at a shop near school, and they swore that I had to steam clean the engine. They quoted me a total of several huundred dollars.
So I smelled a rat, and asked what the minimum amount of work was to get the car running again. They said $20 for new spark plugs. I told them to do that, and that I wanted an explanation when I came to pick up the car of why all this work needed to be done, and to see any parts they had removed. Needless to say, no explanaiton was forthcoming, nor were the parts, and when I called them on it, the mechanic yanked a random set of plugs out of the dumpster to show me.
I drove the car to another mechanic my mom’s friend recommended, and he told me there was nothing wrong with the car except potentially the spark plugs that had already been replaced. I have gone there ever since, and he’s never steererd me wrong; a couple of years ago I needed to have over $1k in work done on a 12-year-old car (brakes, replace alternator/starter, etc.), and was wondering whether it was time to throw in the towel on it and buy a new car. He swore the car was just having a midlife crisis and had many miles left on it (it only had maybe 56k). So far, he’s been absolutely right, and I’ve been glad to have a reliable, paid-off car ever since.
Day of my drivers test. Like an hour before the test, the inevitable happens: a headlight goes. Mom and I take it to the nearest repair shop and we’re freaking out because I’ve got the test soon and I have a car I can’t use! They put us to the front of the line out of the goodness of their hearts.
Didn’t pass the test though, ha ha ha.
Had my automatic car starter installed at an aftermarket place. After a year, it stopped working, but it didn’t matter too much to me because it was summer so I didn’t need to let the car run. Dad took it in, they took a look at it right away and replaced it no charge. I have a gut feeling the super fantastic service came from the fact that the owner is chummy with my brother on a business basis.
I bought a used car from a local dealer my sophomore year in college. Less than a month later, the clutch died while I was driving on the interstate. The place I bought it from (a used car dealer and garage,) send a tow truck out to get it (I went to college over two hours away,) and fixed it for free.
My next car was also bought there a few years later the water pump in the first one died. I bought it in winter, so I didn’t notice until several months later the AC wouldn’t work. The next time I was home, I brought it in and they fixd that for free as well, even though it was almost half a year later. But they also knew that I had no way of knowing in the middle of winter that the AC didn’t work.
That is awesome that you have used the same quality shop for 20 years.
But… (hijack ahead) two paragraphs before that you said
This something I have never understood. You have a quality shop, they do good work, they charge a fair price, but you take your oil change to the premier ripoff chain in the United States for you oil changes? (If you doubt the truth of my calling them the premier ripoff chain Google Jiffy Lube +ripoff, or go to you tube for some TV news reports)
Why in the world would you do that? do you not like your local shop, and don’t want them to be successful? Do you think they already have all the money they need?
Seriously I can’t wrap my mind around this. As a service manager it is totally in my best interest to make sure that every customer I can get to come back, comes back for each and every service. So please help me to understand why, when you have a great local shop, you would take your car to Jiffy Lube for anything.
[/hijack]
PS How do you know the guys at Iffy lube even know which end of the lube gun goes on the zerk fitting?
