Think You Might Have Been Cheated? Ask the "Judge" and "Jury" Right Here!

oldharry

While not common, with any mass produced product a defective one can slip through the system. The owner may have found an employee hiding a mistake in diagnosis from you and him. As a shop owner, I try to make the customer happy, but have to watch for the customer that is out to get me.

I once had a woman bring in a Volvo that she had just purchased used. On the test drive before working on it I discovered a power steering problem, it had a "catch" when staightening from a sharp left turn at low speed. The steering rack was the culprit, and a rebuilt one $895, exchange. The IMMEDIATE, "It never did that before you worked on it!", and subsequent comments made it apparent that she knew of the problem, and was hoping that I would align the car, then get stuck for replacing the rack that "never did that. . ."

In your case, the owner decided that you were being straight forward, and took the loss.

Harry

Mr_Shiftright

Fixing modern cars is a tough job, and every shop, even the very best (and I KNOW some great shops) will....absolutely WILL...screw up now and then.

The sign of a good repair shop is NOT that they are faultless and perfect....the sign of a good shop is that they will MAKE IT RIGHT and work out something that's fair to all concerned.

Can a new part be defective? Absolutely. Failure rate out of the box for new parts could plausibly be 1%, and for rebuilt parts up to 10% I've been told (which is not a good rate, but you get what you pay for in rebuilts).

So you see how tough it is to diagnose problems....can you imagine what it's like when it's possible to get a defective new part? The mechanic installs it and still has a problem...the last thing he's thinking is that the new part is bad.

jlflemmons

I did a tune-up on my '66 Mustang once with new points. 25 miles down the road that sucker died stone cold. Opened up the distributor and found that the moving arm of the point had broken clean off. And yes, they were put in correctly. Several times I have run into rebuilt carbs that were worse than the unit being removed. One even had the internal venturi bent. Try that with a one barrel carb and see how well the car runs!

Jim

isellhondas

When I managed a shop years ago, it was common to have problems blamed on us that we didn't cause.

It got so bad that we notated fresh scratches, missing hubcaps on the repair orders before working on the car.

Many cars brought in for transmission fluid changes, in fact had bad transmissions. We road tested all of these first.

" It never did that before you worked on it"

Yeah...right!

And Shifty is so right...it can be VERY hard to pinpoint a driveability probem on today's cars even for the best mechanic using the very best equipment.

Sadly I learned the hard way that often trying to save a customer money usually backfires.

Mr_Shiftright

Also many consumers don't realize that there is tremendous pressure put on people in the car business....the government and the competition squeeze the factory/ the factory squeezes the dealer with allocation, cutting gross to stay in a price bracket, disallowing warranty claims/ the dealer owner is squeezing the service manager to maximize profits and flogging the salesmen/women to always increase sales/ the service manager is squeezing the technicians to mazimize billable routines/ the technician squeezes....??? well, somebody's got to be on the bottom of the food chain!

So I really give little credence to any conspiracy theory between factory/dealer and technician. The whole system is geared to maximum efficiency and profit, and even the car itself is built not to be "fixed" but to have quick modular replacements made.

This is why I recommend that most people ditch their cars under 100K miles if they can afford to do so. Cars are going to get harder and harder to repair and it's going to cost more and more to repair them.

Fortunately, it isn't all grim and black, because cars themselves are also getting better and better, even though their complexity is increasing. Someday cars will be like TV sets and washing machines. They run a long time and when they don't, you'll throw them away.