On you or someone else? I would assume it happens much more to women versus men since guys generally know more about cars than girls do. But there are those few who dont really know a whole lot and can be taken advantage of. If you caught a shop doing it, what did you do and how did you prove they were doing it?

 

A Hyundai Dealer attempted to charge me a half hour of labor to replace a rear washer nozzle on my Tiburon. They said it wasn't covered under warranty since I had been in an accident and the rear hatch needed to be rewelded (even though a Hyundai dealer sourced the repairs), but insisted THEY needed to install it to maintain the rest of my warranty. Water was leaking into my hatch because the washer nozzle wasn't fitting tight. It took 15 seconds to pull the old and install the new, and they tried getting me to pay them $36 for labor on a $3 part. I ordered the part from another dealer and replaced it myself.



A Hyundai Dealer attempted to deny warranty work for a known automatic transmission failure in my 2000 Tiburon and cited my fiberglass body kit as the potential cause, stating that my body being lower to the ground could cause the car to bottom out, messing with the internals of the transmission. When I replied that fiberglass would easily shatter under any impact, they switched their excuse to my Cold Air Intake. I took it to another dealership and they replaced it without question.

 

Inb4 "Jay"

 

it has never happened to me but i have heard stories of shop owners ripping people off. my buddy used to work at a european car shop and they once got a v8 jaguar s-type in for repairs, the problem was the water pump which the shop bought from a jag dealer for something like $350 dollars, after they bought it my buddy called a local ford parts store and found out through the jag pump part number that the pump was the same as a lincoln ls pump which was only $75 bucks, so the shops owner made my buddy return the jag pump and buy the ford pump but still charged the customer the jag pump price.



at that same shop, they got in a bmw 3 series for a full timing kit overhaul. the shop owner didnt have the proper tools to do the job, the chain requires special tolls to be removed and replaced, so he changed what he could, cleaned the sh*t out of the engine bay and never actually changed the chain. but he still charged the customer for the job and parts which he never even did.

 

Oh boy, where do I start? I know so many people who almost got ripped off until I stepped in.



I don't take my cars anywhere at all anymore. I'm tired of stories from shops.



One guy told me I had to use a "special oil" he wouldn't tell me about for my ex's new (at the time) Elantra and it was going to cost $50 for the oil change.



Another told my dad he needed $1900 in brake work on his truck because it was unsafe. He had 50% brake pads left and nothing wrong with the rotors.



Another told him his shocks were going to break off the control arms because the brackets weren't solid. It's got a bracket with slotted holes for adjustment.



...

 

Yea, I caught myself committing insurance fraud. I was in a car accident which i didnt cause. So i milked the hell out of the other persons insurance. I went to a really expensive body shop got a printed quote and went to my friends car dealer ship and had him PHOTO CHOP the quote and he put his letter head on the paper work. Then wrote me a fake receipt stating that i paid in full to repair the damage to my vehicle. For something that only cost me $250 in parts and my labor. The insurance paid me out $3,200. Boy i was one happy camper! By the way this happened 7 years ago.