Legal recouse vs. auto dealership (repairs related)

Factual Questions
1

A quick backstory
My Jeep Wrongler has been acting weird. While driving, it shuts off…however once I get pulled over, it starts right back up.

I took it to 2 different repair shops here at the beach, spent over $600, and it was still acting up. They replaced a couple of sensors, but could find nothing else wrong.

I finally decided to bite the bullet and take it to a Jeep dealer over in town. The dealer called me, said they had found the problem, and it would cost $718 to fix. I said go ahead and do it, if you found the actual problem, because I’m about to sell it and buy a new car and I don’t want it to be unsafe.

Final total, including rental fees for the 3 weeks it took to fix–almost 2 grand.

Now, I broke my ankle 3 days after I got it back, so I have driven it very very little. Today, it AGAIN started dying while driving (4 times in 10 minutes).

Does the Jeep dealership have any responsibility to fix it, since they claimed to have fixed the problem before? OR, am I entitled to a refund of the past charges, since obviously the parts they replaced did not fix the problem. (They basically replaced the entire electrical system, plugs/distributor/cap/rotor/wires/etc)

2

It sounds like they just did a tune-up for $718/$2K and that did not fix the problem. If you needed those parts then you should pay for them but it sounds like they just through a bunch of parts at it hoping to solve the problem.

How many miles on the Jeep?

Sounds like it could be a coil or fuel pump.

3

They replaced the coil too.

The distributor itself was the expensive part of the whole mess.

My thought is that 1)they knew I was about to sell it, and I had just done a tune-up myself last year, and would NOT have replaced all that stuff if it was not going to fix the problem.

They did a fuel pressure test, it was fine.

4

Have you looked at the agreement you signed when you took it in? Is there a warranty period for the work? If so, you should be able to use it as a basis for a demand for satisfaction. Even if no warranty is expressed, there may be state statutes that provide for implied warranty.

5

I would take it back and tell them to fix it. When they find what is really causing the problem, then you should only pay for that which you really needed