SHORT REVIEW: Untrustworthy, Unreliable, Incompetent
DETAILED REVIEW:
My young adult daughter lives out of state from me and had a problem with her car not starting. She asked for my assistance with getting her car repaired. Road side service was not able to jump start the car and it had a brand new battery, so that was clearly not the problem. Her car was towed to A1 and they took it in on a Saturday afternoon. By Monday afternoon, they still had not conclusively diagnosed the problem, but believed the car needed a new starter.
PROBLEM #1: No communication from A1. We had to call each time for an update, they did not call us to tell us what was going on.
On Tuesday, they replaced the starter but that did not solve the problem. When I asked the manager, Greg, how that could be since they had diagnosed the starter as the problem. I told him I was confused about that. He became condescending and rude retorting, "What's so confusing about it?"
PROBLEM #2: Rude, sarcastic communication from staff.
I spoke to the owner, Tony, who assured me they would get to the bottom of things. They supposedly determined that a "connector wire" was bent and once straightened out, the car started again repeatedly with the old starter. On Wednesday, the car was released with a clean bill of health. Minimal charge for labor, and no new starter needed. It seemed too good to be true, and it was.
Two days later, the car failed to start, showing the exact same symptoms as before. Car was towed back to A1 on a Friday afternoon. I spoke to Tony again, but he was "with a customer" and could not talk to me. I asked him to call me back when he had time to talk. He called me back a short while later and told me he'd "figure out what went wrong, OK?" I told him it really wasn't OK and that we needed to figure out where the diagnostic went wrong in the first place. I explained that it concerned me greatly that the owner of a business was not more bothered that his shop had possession of a vehicle for four days without solving the problem. Furthermore, my daughter was stranded, again, with a car that wouldn't start and was forced to obtain a rental car for the second time in a week. His response was to tell me that he didn't have the vehicle for four days, that it was really only two business days.
PROBLEM #3: The owner of the business was insufficiently concerned about the mistakes made by his staff to properly diagnose and repair the car.
On Saturday morning, the manager, Greg, called me to tell me they were going to replace the starter. When I expressed my confusion about why they would replace the starter when they had already done that earlier in the week without positive results, he retorted, "Do you want to come down here and diagnose the problem yourself?" At that point, I must confess that I lost my composure. I told him we'd have the car towed to a different shop and not to do anything further with it.
PROBLEM #4: More rude, sarcastic behavior from the manager coupled with a complete disregard to correct a problem they failed to correctly assess the first time.
Bottom line: There seems to be no integrity or pride to stand behind their work. When one adds in offensive behavior, I wonder how they stay in business at all. read more