creatorbri

Wouldn't it be nice if BOTH spouses always felt that way..

I don't think I've ever had a really good experience at a dealership. They charge more, as others have indicated, and I almost always end up having to get the problem "re-fixed" somewhere else. Unless the problem falls under warranty service (and isn't excluded under some loophole), I'd much rather have a trustworthy, local indie mechanic who maybe charges a little less than the dealers, but a little more than other 3rd parties -- yet I know I'm getting my money's worth.

Oh, and one more lesson I've learned in all of this -- my wife and her family have trusted this other guy for years, but I'm always naturally skeptical of mechanics, so I don't put too much faith in any single one. I've been messed over by dealers' service centers as much as anywhere else. The lesson is, from now on, I don't think I'll take my car anywhere else but my wife's family's mechanic if I can possibly help it!! P.S. That would be Autobahn in Logan, UT. If you're anywhere near the area -- as some of you may well be, given that this is an LDS board -- give them a try, and tell "Jason" a friend of the Boxx family referred ya!

All good points. Still, with a kid on the way and a painfully tight budget (which has now been blown to smithereens) I'm going to take the guy up on his offer to refund the $60 -- every little bit helps. Thanks for the feedback, folks.

Nice old mechanic cost me $300, fight or forgive?? I'm sorry this is long, but I could really use some feedback here. My car died on the way to work the other day, and I managed to coast off the freeway and into a gas station. Noticed a little mechanic's shop across the road, so I walked over and the proprietor, a friendly white-haired guy named Dave, came over and helped me get the car started and drove it over to his shop, a little two-bay box of a building. It's neat and clean and efficient, and he tells me he's been running the place for 39 years. I noticed photos of his wife, kids, and grandkids on his desk. So he hooked up the car and ran a diagnostic. He looked up the codes in an old book that looks like the Yellow Pages -- no Internet here, folks -- and says "oh, it looks like you need a new Throttle Position Sensor (TPS)." Then he calls the dealer in the area, and says the part will be $60, labor 80-100, plus the diagnostic fee -- about $200 w/ tax. I take the train to work. He calls me and says "actually the dealer quoted me for the wrong part, it will be $200, not $60. But it looks like it's gonna be about $60 for labor, so total is $300." Ok, I have a baby on the way and an extremely tight budget. I thought we could probably manage to squeeze in $200 for repairs -- but now I'm thinking, where am I gonna come up with another $100? Oh well, I need a car to get to work -- guess we'll just be late on a couple of bills. I pay the bill, get the car back, and lo and behold heading home from work the following day, my car dies again. I manage to make it back home, and the next day I take it in to a mechanic in my home town that I actually know and trust this time. He runs more tests. "Ok, well there's actually a service bulletin out from the manufacturer on this car model, it says that the problem is not the throttle position sensor, but the accelerator position sensor. Your other mechanic may not have known that they are two different things on this car." Ah. So I wasted $300 because the nice old veteran mechanic didn't have the Internet and his books were out of date -- otherwise he'd have known that this car has two different parts, not one, and that the OTHER one was a common fail point in this vehicle. My TPS unit was fine all along. So I called the guy and told him the situation, and asked him to at least refund me the $80 for diagnostics and labor. He says, "Well, I didn't know that they were two different parts. The code book for the diagnostic machine said it was the TPS unit, so that's what we replaced. If you go to the doctor and he says its X illness, and gives you medicine, do you get your money back because the medicine didn't help? I can't get a refund on the part, but I'm willing to give you $60 back for the labor, that's more than enough." I argued with him about it for a minute, but then decided it wasn't worth quibbling over $20. Still, his mistake means I've got to come up with ANOTHER $300 to get the thing fixed RIGHT.. So why do I feel guilty for demanding a refund??