I had the worst experience I've ever had pertaining to auto repairs at this place. My passenger side windshield wiper stopped working so I brought my car in to have it checked out. They diagnosed it and quoted me a price, and while it was super high ($225 for the part which had to be ordered, about $30 for the diagnostic, and probably $235 for the labor costs) I figured it was reasonable seeing as how I'm dealing with a european car thats no longer on the market in Hawaii at the only dealership specified for this vehicle. Oh well. They told me it would take about 10 days for the part to come in and as long as I still had one wiper that worked I was ok with that.
Two days later on a Saturday I am gingerly using my one wiper during a rain storm to get me home and low and behold it stops working. What luck! Now I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing when it comes to cars but I'm thinking I at least have to try and figure out what is wrong with this as I really don't want to be without ANY wipers for the next 8 days. So I pop the hood, use my cell phone flashlight to look through the grate where I can see the wiper mechanism has fallen off the gear, and use brute force (I have no tools) to pry the plastic cover off just enough to get my fat hand under there to mess around. It seems pretty logical and straight forward as to what went wrong and I just try to put pieces where I think they should go like I'm a 6 year old doing my first puzzle... circle goes in round hole, nut goes on top, screw tight. Cool, lets give this thing a shot. I turn my car on and both wipers start working!!! I am a genius! I let them run for a while and nope, this is no fluke, they are both working beautifully. Yay! But now I'm furious, how the hell didn't an experienced Saab mechanic see this when I fixed the problem in 10 minutes and am not mechanically inclined at all?! I can really only see it one of two ways, the guy was two lazy to take the time to diagnose the problem correctly (he probably just turned my wipers on and when they didn't work just assumed it was the whole mechanism that was broken or something. I doubt he even popped the grate off to look at the damn thing), OR they just tried to rip me off.
Either way, when I went back to the shop to get my money back the girl (not the nice one, Johanna) that helped me was a complete bitch, like she knew I had caught them or something and while they did refund me for the $225, she would not refund me for the diagnostic fee! What kind of customer service is that?! You diagnosed the problem WRONG but you are still making the customer pay for it? And I know it was only over like $30 but its the principal isn't it? What kind of business are you running?! No explanation, no apology, no "we might have missed this but something else could still be wrong", no "well let me have the mechanic look at it again for FREE to make sure what you did was right", no nothing. You definitely just lost a customer for good and I hope that this review will steer away other potential customers in the future. This whole ordeal was one big headache but I definitely learned my lesson. Its definitely frustrating owning a Saab on a small island where theres only a few mechanics that are willing to work on them but I swear I'd rather pay $500 for my own tools that I might never use again and spend a week learning how to fix a future problem myself than ever give this establishment another dime of my money. read more