Dealerships Suck…
In advance of my trip to San Antonio for my Grandmother’s funeral, I decided to finally get my car in for service. I am the worst procastinator where car service is concerned.
So today I took my car to Park Place Motorcars – Bedford to handle regular service, a rough idle condition, a running light outage, and a state inspection. I figured this would go like clockwork.
However, in my initial discussion with the Service Advisor, he mentioned that the running light bulb would cost $15 to $28. I was stunned. I had recently replaced the bulb on the other side for under $5 and it took me mere minutes — I did it out in the parking lot of the NAPA store. So when I balked at the price, I was told that Mercedes has premium parts and that a skilled, trained technician would be doing the work and that the cost was justified. I retorted that NAPA’s parts are probably pretty good and that I WAS NOT a trained technician and yet had successfully completed the fix in mere minutes. So as such, I decided on principle to scratch that off their list. I don’t like giving away my money.
On the way to work, I calmed down and noted that I was in a free loan car — a new CLK 240. So I thought maybe I could have paid for the bulb and all would have washed out. A few years ago, loan cars weren’t the norm.
At about 2pm, I hadn’t heard from the dealership, so I decided I better call them. I was needing to ensure that the service would be complete today just in case I had to go to San Antonio tomorrow. At that time, I was given a $909 estimate for my repairs. It seems that the rough idle condition was diagnosed as a spark plug and an engine/transmission mount problem. The mounts part of that sounded suspicious, so I had them cut that out. That reduced the quote to around $250 or so.
So around 4pm, I received a call stating my car was ready. To my surprise, the bill was $500+!! In reviewing the detail, it turns out that the scheduled service represented half of that. So the Service Advisor was quoting me the extra amount required to fix the rough idle. I hadn’t understood that previously. It made me wonder if they did that on purpose.
As I reviewed the details, I also noted that the rough idle was fixed by replacing the spark plugs at a parts cost of about $39. The labor was $236! I was astounded by that. Maybe I have unrealistic expectations, but I really thought that was quite out of balance. When I questioned the Service Advisor, he mentioned that it took a lot of time to hook the car up to a laptop to run the diagnostics. And also, the car had to be jacked up high. I really thought automation would save us time and money. For all I know, the technician hooked up my car, initiated the test, and then went off on a smoke break. And jacking the car up is a push of a button, I think.
And just to cap the story off, the state inspection was not done because their state inspection machine was out and wouldn’t be fixed until Monday.
So in the end, I know why loan cars are made available for us. While there is no direct charge, we’re definitely paying for them.
For what its worth, my car is out of warranty and I plan never to return to the dealership. I am thinking there are plenty of smaller shops which can provide quality, affordable service.
So I wonder if I’m playing the victim here or if I really did just get screwed…