I had my car, an '02 Camaro, towed to Dunlap-Johnson on February 28th; I was reasonably sure that the fuel pump was dead. I told this to the (new) service manager, Mat Johnson when I got to the dealership.
Matt called back a couple of days later, told me the fuel pump was dead, and I authorized a replacement for ~$1400 and asked for an oil change as well. It was an extensive repair: the fuel tank needed to be removed and the exhaust system had to be dropped to allow that to happen.
On March 11th, I received a call from Matt at roughly 12:10pm telling me that I could pick up the car. I called him back and explained that I wanted to go ahead and resolve an existent coolant leak. Both repairs were "completed" on March 13th.
The issues began when I went to pick up my car, with the assurance that the fuel pump and coolant leak had been resolved. Total cost was $1755.29. When I started my car, I immediately noticed a loud metal rattling sound. Matt and the technician who had worked on the car came out to look at it.
The technician looked under the car and stated that he had forgotten to put a bolt back in. He put the bolt back in - which didn't solve the rattle - and then determined that he had damaged a clip that held the exhaust lines. It would probably need to be replaced. He tightened a bolt and temporarily fixed the rattle. He then apologized to me and said that he didn't hear the rattle during the test drive because he had his earbuds in. I was allowed to take the car home, and was told to call/bring it back in if the rattling started up again. It started rattling again on the way home, and Matt told me they could get it in on March 19th.
Over the next few days, I started to notice the issues with the service.
I pulled the oil dipstick and discovered that the oil had been overfilled; also, the work order showed that the technician had used 5W/30 oil instead of the 10W/30 the engine calls for. I was confused, because the car's oil cap literally says 10W/30 on it.
The radiator was low on coolant and the overflow tank was empty.
There was a used shop towel in my passenger seat, the cap for the valve on the fuel rail had been left off (I found it on my windshield), and my oil pressure was reading 20 PSI higher than it had been.
I called Matt on March 18th at 10:54am, and told him of the issues with the service. I wrote down a list of what I had found (see picture), gave it to Matt, and dropped off my car again. I showed Matt the issues with the car, including the massive oil pressure spike; he blamed it on an aftermarket oil pressure sensor that I hadn't seen before.
March 19th, I received a call from Matt telling me that the low coolant was caused by a 2nd leak. They didn't pressure test the system after resolving the 1st leak. The second leak was found on the intake manifold; I asked Matt how difficult that would be to fix, and he said, roughly, "I don't really want to get into something like that on a car this age, because something is going to break in the process."
Matt also revealed that the technician had installed the mystery oil pressure sensor himself because he broke the original part while working on the car and had not recorded the incident on the work order.
From there, Matt proceeded to belittle me and act in an extremely unprofessional and condescending manner. He waved the dirty shop towel that was left in my car in front of my face, pointing out that it wasn't actually all that dirty. I reminded him that the towel itself was a minor issue and was simply another example of the carelessness the department had displayed. He then picked up my note, waved it around, and said, sarcastically, "Well I just want to make sure we talk about it, because it was #9 on your list."
Matt continued to be unprofessional, and pointed out that he had made the original tech work on my car from 8am-12pm to fix the issues. Everything was presented to me as though I was being done a favor; even though every service after the first was just fixing mistakes made by the service department. read more