On warranties and such
If you’re a car dealer that sells one make of cars, but offer quite a few other cars in the used car lot, and you sell warranties on those cars - meaning you intend to fix those cars yourselves, or have them fixed *through* your network of mechanics - and you have a car come in that you have no way of diagnosing, wouldn’t you say something about that in the first place?
Here’s the deal - a year ago I bought a previously owned Mercedes-Benz (it’s a 2002) from a car dealer a short drive away from my apartment. When purchasing said Mercedes, I knew that one of the things I most certainly wasn’t wanting to have to shell out for in the next year or so were any serious service issues (drivetrain, etc.), hence the warranty purchase. The car dealer said they’d be able to handle working on the car beforehand, so I figured that was a good deal. All that said, I’m a bit aghast at the fact that I dropped my car off on Monday in the early afternoon, was told that THEY might have to take it to a Mercedes dealer should they not be able to fix the problem or diagnose it, but that they’d take a look and do what needed to be done. The problem at hand was that I’d been having an odd transmission issue (or so it seemed) after starting the car, and my check engine light had just come on. No worries, right? Wrong. Well, they finally called me back - three days later - and nothing’s happened. Their “universal” system checker wasn’t able to figure anything out on the car, and now I’d need to make time to get a ride all the way back out to the dealer (I’ve since moved and it’s about 10 miles further away than it was), pick up my car, and find myself a Mercedes dealership that could service the vehicle, and that “hopefully” the dealer would have an ability to do a warranty transfer or something along those lines that would pay for the issue. I’m sorry, but that’s not how things work. If that’s how it’s going to work, then I’m most certainly having them pay me back the cost of the warranty that’s been paid so far and remove any further cost of it from the upcoming payments over the next few years on my financing. There’s no “maybe” it’ll get covered here, it’s just getting covered. If they weren’t capable of diagnosing the car in the first place, then why accept it when I made an appointment to drop it off, and why wait three days (wasting three days of The Fiancee and I having no car) to do so?
Ugh. What a disaster. I’m sure there will be more fun and excitement to share in this particular area.