Oh, the fun times to be had at a car dealership service department.
I took my Saturn Astra to a local GM dealership for a cheap oil change and a new battery (which was somehow cheaper than at AutoZone).
After getting driven insane by the Wendy Williams show on the TV in the lobby for an hour, my car was ready. The Service Advisor brought up my “recommended services”: A fuel system cleaning, a brake fluid flush, and, best of all, a transmission fluid flush. The techs noticed that the trans fluid was “discolored”.
We have a PT Cruiser. (If anyone tries to give you one of these for free, walk away. But punch him first). It was bought at a year old; two months later the dealership went out of business.
We have had UNENDING, MAJOR problems for a car not even 5 years old. As it is our only option right now <not even paid off, total piece of shit!> we have to keep repairing it.
The automatic transmission started not shifting a month ago. Took it to our mechanic, who did lots of things, and it came down to a computer part. Said part came in, mechanic installed, but it wouldn’t run the spedometer. Car dealership said they’d have to put it in. Took the local dealership nearly 3 weeks to get the car in for service. Got it back, and the next day all the same problems started again. Took it back to the mechanic, and he’ll bring it back to the dealership, but mechanic says the parts from this dealership have failed more often than not, sometimes 3-5 times before getting one that works. We;ll find out if the next one works, probably not for a couple weeks, though!
Plymouth can bite my ass. I am this close to just deliberately wrecking the thing for the insurance.
Does it say when you’re supposed to change the fluid? I know they check mine when I get an oil change, but they only say something if I actually need to have it changed. They might have been checking to see if it needed to be changed, not if it was low.
It’s a PT Cruiser, do you really need to know how slow you’re going? Its almost certainly something under 30 mph; the chassis rattle will tell you if it’s more.
The brake fluid flush is a good idea. It’s hydroscopic and I would guess it’s never been changed. I recommend a three year interval for street cars, more often if it’s high horsepower.
The rest is unnecessary. Name-brand gasoline has cleaners in it (dry gas also, for those in colder regions). They can probably drain and refill the transmission while it’s up on the lift getting the brake fluid flushed. It only costs them about $5 in labor and $2 in parts and it couldn’t be a bad thing. Except that I doubt they’ll only charge you the $10 it’s worth. If they told me it was $15, I still wouldn’t let them.
:dubious: What does engine horsepower have to do with how much water the brake fluid has absorbed?
I believe the point of the OP was that since it’s a manual transmission car, the “transmission fluid” (in this case, ordinary gear oil) probably didn’t actually get checked. Two reasons:
-whereas automatic transmissions usually have a dipstick for checking the fluid level (which enables easily checking the fluid color), manual transmissions don’t; they have a fill plug and a drain plug, neither of which is typically easy to get to, so you don’t check the fluid level in a manual-transmission unless there’s a puddle on the floor of your garage.
-whereas the fluid in an automatic transmission can get cooked/damaged (and therefore discolored) by high temperatures encountered when the torque converter is active for a long period of time, e.g. when towing a heavy trailer over a mountain pass, the gear oil in a manual transmission will never see such high temps unless that manual transmission is actively destroying itself; there just isn’t that much energy being dissipated inside a manual transmission.
I’ve found one dealer and two auto shops in the area that I can trust. There are a lot crooks out there that just want to pad your bill.
One shop tried the “discolored” trans fluid trick. You can tell if an A/T trans fluid is bad if it looks and smells burnt. I had taken my FIL’s land yacht in for an oil change and the franchise outfit showed me a 4x6" paper with a “clean” trans fluid stain and next to my “dirty” trans fluid stain. I told him that it wasn’t my car and I couldn’t remember how many miles the car had on it. When he realized the car only had 6,000 miles on it, he never came back to talk to me.
Another time I dropped off a GM X-body car at the dealer for a new clutch. Didn’t ask up front what the cost would be. When I went to pick it up, they wanted $600 for the job. (It was a very long time ago.) I told them that a clutch shouldn’t cost more than $275. We discussed it for a while and he suggest that anyone who quoted under $300 was probably inserting “used” parts. Used clutch parts??? At that point I asked him to show me the “blue book rate” for changing a clutch. He went into the back room and came out with a new bill that totaled $275. What a surprise.
From the other side of the counter.
Guy comes in says he took his 2.5 year old car to another dealer for an oil leak repair, they took it on a test drive and the engine locked up. Says they denied the warranty, and he would have to pay for the engine, about 15K.
He wants to know if he tows it to us, if I will do it under warranty.
My spidey sense starts to tingle big time.
2+2 seems to be adding up to 37.6, so I tell him I’ll get back to him.
I contact the factory rep, and we conference call the other dealer.
The real story is, car was towed in with the engine locked up.
Brand new oil filter.
Shinny clean motor oil.
Under engine cover is clean enough to eat off of. Rest of underbody has oil and dirt stains.
Call customer, ask if oil was just changed. Claims it was done 4K miles ago.
Dealer removes filter. Inside of filter is dry.
Putting it all together
Super clean under engine cover + oil stains on rest of underbody = oil leak that someone tried to cover up by cleaning the cover.
Super fresh oil, the exact same color as what comes out of the bottle = oil is NOT 4K miles old
Brand new oil filter + no oil inside = filter was installed after engine locked up.
Conclusion, guy did his own oil change, or had somebody else do one for him. Oil filter leaked (Possibly the gasket from the first filter stuck to the block, happens sometimes). All the oil leaked out, engine locked up, customer thought he was smarter than the average bear, and tried to lie his way into a new engine to the tune of $15K.
Too bad he just wasn’t quite good enough.
While I’m on the subject, at one time I was thinking of buying a very used 4WD Chevy Blazer in Denver. Nothing fancy but I only wanted it to go fishing in the mountains. The salesman seemed nice. I asked him if they could do a compression check on the engine. He disappeared into the service area and came back with piece of paper that indicated that all 8 cylinders were exactly 120 psi. Not bad for a 6 cylinder engine and I’ve never seen an engine where all of the cylinders read exactly the same psi. I walked out without saying a word and never went back.
In 1992 I took my 1982 Corolla to the garage next to work to change a headlight. When I went to pick it up at lunchtime, the dude at the counter gave me some checklist with all the stuff that was wrong. (I was a 22 year-old impressionable female, after all.) When I got to the line that said my power steering belt was loose I looked at the guy and pointed to it. :dubious: MmmHmm. “It doesn’t have power steering. If the drive belt was bad, I’d have more problems than with just the steering. If I had power steering. How 'bout I come back if I’m really having a problem with something besides a headlight?” And of course never went back.
Only problem I ever had with that car was the choke went bad. My mechanic dad installed a manual one (wow, I forgot about that for at least a decade until writing this post!) and it was a good little car until I sold it in 1995.
Back in the 70s, I had my very first new car and I was away at college, so when it started doing something it shouldn’t have, I picked out a local garage to fix it. As I recall, it took 3 rather expensive visits, and neither visit 2 nor 3 problems had appeared before or were caused by visit 1. yeah. :rolleyes: I was young and timid then, but I’ve since gotten over it.
Then there was the time I took our Diesel Jetta to a quick-oil-change franchise and they tried to tell me I needed some sort of service that isn’t required on a diesel engine - by that time I was smart enough not to fall for it, and I never returned to that place again.
Fortunately, about 7 years ago, we found a small local shop that’s been great. They’ll explain to me why certain things need to be done and they answer my questions as if they’re speaking to an intelligent adult! :eek: They really won points when I took in my old van and said “Give it a going-over and tell me what it needs” and they said other than an oil change, I was good. Sadly, since I’ve retired and since we got a Sonata that is now our go-everywhere vehicle, my Scion is amassing less than a quarter of the monthly miles it used to get, so instead of seeing my car guys every 5K miles, I’m seeing them every 6 months (on their guidance.)
Oh yeah, and we found this shop because the dealer we’d been using at the time quoted us 3 days and a ridiculous amount of money to fix something that these guys did the next day for some dollars less…
And speaking of headlights, I couldn’t believe that my daughter’s Beetle said right in the owner’s manual that you needed to take it to the dealer to replace a headlight. Criminy, along with wiper blades, that should be a quick-and-easy owner replacement, not something requiring an appointment and several hours wasted! Luckily, I found instructions, with pictures, on line and I taught her how to replace her own headlights.
I was unsure about that but a quick scan of the definition seemed to fit so I went with it. Thanks for the correction; maybe I’ll remember next time.
It doesn’t but powerful cars have a tendency to be driven at higher speeds. Therefore, proper brake function becomes more critical.
Any mechanic that has a car up on a lift for routine maintenance wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t check the trans fluid. It takes seconds. Unscrew the fill plug, stick your pinkie in. If it doesn’t come out stanky, you need fluid. Service intervals on most items are 30K miles. You can leak a lot of fluid in small drops in that period of time. if it’s seeping into the bell housing it can become aerated and blown out the seams without being seen.
I’m aware of how manual transmission fluid works, I’ve been elbow deep in it for forty years. I agree that it doesn’t go bad, but it picks up metal fragments from the synchros and missed gears. It doesn’t need to be changed often but again, it takes seconds to pull the drain plug, put a drain under it and go do other things while the car is up in the air. It takes less than a minute to pump it full again when you’re about to drop the car. The only downside that I can see is if your mechanic is distracted and forgets to refill. It’s less than $10 parts and labor. If the shop is willing to do it without gouging you on price, I think it’s worth doing at major service intervals (30K or so). Service recommendations are geared toward providing reasonable durability while providing income for dealerships and without nickel-and-diming the customer so much that they don’t come back. There’s never any harm in shaving the recommended intervals by a third if you can afford it, and to cut the intervals on major items (100K+) in half.
