I came in for a smog check after recently replacing some parts and clearing codes on my truck. I…read morehad driven it around afterward and thought I had given the emissions monitors enough time to reset.
Apparently, they were not ready yet. This is where the problem begins. Any decent shop would contact the customer the moment they plugged in the truck, let them know the monitors were not ready, and tell them to drive it more and come back. That is not how this shop handled it.
Instead, they charged me $50, called it a failed smog even though their own paperwork said "NOT READY," told me I would have to pay full price again when I came back, and then wanted another $150 to "diagnose" why it did not pass.
The irony is that there was apparently nothing mysterious to diagnose. The monitors simply had not completed yet. They never clearly explained that to me. I ended up putting two and two together myself from the paperwork they handed me, and I fear many people have fallen prey to this trap and paid $150 for such a basic piece of information.
When I went back in and pushed back on the charge, the guy behind the desk said, "It failed, and I told you it was $50 for a fail." I had only taken it here because they said they could squeeze me in. They were completely empty, probably for good reason. I was also confident that there was no warning light or any actual emissions problem that would cause the truck to fail.
I pointed directly to the sheet where it said "NOT READY" and told him, "That does not say fail. It says not ready." His response was basically, "Well, we tried to test it and it didn't pass."
That is a pathetic money grab for two seconds of work.
At that point, I told him that we clearly have very different understandings of what a failed smog test means. To me, a vehicle actually being tested and failing emissions is very different from a vehicle simply not being ready to complete the test because its monitors are not yet ready.
Then, to make the interaction even more bizarre, we were told that "they would have told us if we came in with better attitudes."
So apparently, the explanation for what happened to your vehicle is something you only get if the staff approves of your attitude. Otherwise, they will apparently let you leave confused and offer to explain it for another $150. This isn't even true, given that when he said it failed over the phone I was quite pleasant and would have respected the entire process if there was actually an issue with the opacity test or some non CARB compliant part on the car. So this statement isn't true because he initially refused and asked $150 for diagnostic over the phone when I was kind and understanding, before I figured out they were pulling a scam.
This could all have been avoided. Once they plugged the truck in and saw that the readiness monitors had not completed, they should have told me it needed to be driven more and had me return once it was actually ready to be tested. They should never have turned that into a $50 "failed" smog, refused to clearly explain what happened, told me I would have to pay again, and then tried to charge another $150 to diagnose it over the phone.
I drove around more and went to an upstanding shop. Not only would that shop have let me know free of charge if the monitors were not ready, but it also had what I consider a pretty standard policy: if a vehicle actually fails, the customer receives a free retest within two weeks.
If you do anything, do not come to this shop for a smog test. Go to any other nonpredatory, half-decent shop. Based on how this situation was handled, I would not trust them with repairs either.
And if nothing else, I will consider the $50 a donation toward a better landline, because somehow you can barely understand a word they are saying on the phone despite the lobby being completely silent.
I would not return, and I absolutely would not recommend this shop.
