March 2nd 2007

There are two basic reasons why consumers get ripped off when buying car repairs. Incompetence and villainy.

Years ago, the same evil twins also operated in the television and appliance repair businesses, but those durables have
become so cheap to replace rather than repair, that the villains have moved on. Cars are not very cheap to replace and are
expected to last for 10-12 years, even in the salt infested Great White North.

The common denominator is the publics' general technical ignorance that allows the most alice-in-wonderland tales to be told
by garages.

Villains starts out right from the beginning to rob the poor car owner. Such examples as changing a perfectly good alternator
and charging for a rebuilt and then tagging the "used" unit to sell to someone else. If they've had time to clean it up, it may even
be represented as a new unit.

Incompetence is a more subtle issue. The problem gets misdiagnosed and the wrong parts are replaced.
Within short order, the car owner returns to complain that the problem either has re-appeared, or never went away.

Now the garage has a problem.

How are they going to avoid admitting they changed the wrong parts to avoid having to give a refund?

The magic phrase is "parallel problems". In other words, we fixed that, now it's this - something entirely different.

The ONLY way that a garage can avoid this conflict is to phone the owner ahead of time, explain what has been found to date and
give him the choice of taking an educated gamble that the problem doesn't have two parts to it.

Wheel bearings are an example of this. The car is test driven and sure enough, at least one bearing is kicking up quite a racket.
So much so, that the other one is being drowned out. A wise garage owner will tell his clients ahead of time that the left bearing
definitely needs replacement, but the right one might also be noisy. Once the car is on the lift and the weight is removed from the
wheels, a noisy bearing sometimes cannot be detected unless it is very loose.

We have witnessed a case of incompetence leading to villainy in our shop this week.

A fellow came to see us with a check engine light glowing on the dashboard. We were the third garage he had visited.

The first one didn't even have a scanner but was sure he needed a tune up. $500 later, he leaves the place and within 10 minutes,
the light is back on again (we always road test every car after repairs are carried out, many garages don't).

So, no longer trusting garage #1 with its scannerless guessing game, the poor chap consults garage #2 which does have a scanner.
They get a code that means "misfire on cylinder #4". So, since the first garage had already done a so called tune up, garage #2
replaced #4 injector.

To be fair, they at least put in a less expensive used one. Nevertheless, the bill still came to over $300.

So, $800 later the check engine light came back on again and the chap arrived on our doorstep.

What, eventually turned out to be the problem with cylinder #4? Garage #1 had used the wrong ignition wires and being too long,
they had got burnt out by touching the exhaust system.

Garage #2 never "found" this problem, because it was only a $75 fix - another set of new wires.

We gave the original new wires back to the client and the last we heard, he was trying to get a refund on everything.

He may not be successful unless he's willing to go to small claims court.

Incompetence turning into villainy, the most common cause of rip-offs in the auto repair business!