Here's a summary of my 2 experience with All Auto Repair and my wife's Mercury Sable:
The first issue was with a squealing sound that would come and go as it pleased. We took it to All Auto Repair after looking up reviews on Google. My wife suggested that it might be an issue with a loose belt and that her father had told us that it could be the auto-tensioner. All Auto Repair told us that it wasn't the auto-tensioner and that the sound was caused by a faulty water pump.
$800 dollars later we have a new water pump in her car. The squeal came back within a day or two. We took the car to her dad and he put in a new auto-tensioner. The new auto-tensioner fixed the problem. Needless to say, my wife was pretty upset with All Auto Repair. I explained to her that car problems can be complicated and that All Auto Repair went with the most obvious issue first.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Her car is leaking fuel vapors from the passenger side, near the fuel filter and tank. The smell is filling our garage and we had to park her car outside. I take a quick look at it, replace the fuel cap and fuel filter. The easy fixes didn't work. So I suggest to her that we take it to All Auto Repair. She is a little apprehensive, but I tell her that they'll have the equipment that we don't and they'll find the issue no problem.
They charge me a bit over $100 and tell me that the fuel leak is probably coming from the weld where the two halves of the fuel tank come together. Wait... probably? We were quoted around $500 for a new fuel tank and labor. They told me they had a smoke-machine. Did they not use it? I was immediately apprehensive and put off by the fact that All Auto Repair couldn't give me a confident answer to what the issue with the tank was, and after our previous experience with the $800 repair that did nothing, I decided I was going to tackle this issue myself.
Keep in mind that I don't have a whole lot of experience with cars. I can change my own oil and that's about it. So I watch some YouTube videos, buy a bottle of UV reactive fuel additive along with a UV flashlight, and follow the instructions. As soon as I dropped the fuel tank (again, I have little to no experience at this point) I immediately noticed where the fuel leak was coming from. It was coming from the area of my fuel pump.
The top of the fuel pump has a little plastic elbow that a high-pressure fuel line connects to. There was an obvious crack at the top of this fuel pump elbow. I didn't need a new gas tank; the tank itself was in terrific shape. I replaced the fuel pump, reinstalled the tank, and now my wife's car has been leak free ever since.
All All Auto Repair would have needed to do was drop my fuel tank to discover what the real issue was. I had paid a little over $100 for what? To park my vehicle in their garage and come back a few days later to be given the bill and a free car wash coupon? They would've had me purchase and install a new fuel tank, which--not unlike the $800 water pump install--would've fixed nothing.
YouTube, AutoZone, and my two hands did more than this dedicated mechanic's shop could. I can't reiterate enough that simply removing my gas tank and using a pair of eyes would've given them all the information they would've needed to diagnose the real issue. The source of the fuel leak is physically above where they claimed it was coming from.
I will never take another vehicle to this shop ever again. read more