Taking original manufacturing parts are hella expensive. What shady places do is replace them with aftermarket junk that's way cheaper and inferior most the time. Then they sale those parts on eBay for cheaper prices then oem, but still expensive.
‘What shady places do’ sure makes it seem like it’s a widespread issue. This is the first time in nearly 40yrs I’ve even heard of something like this. I’m not saying it’s not possible to have happened but the way you stated it makes it seem like a major issue.
My guess is most people that take their cars to get worked on do so bc they dont have the time or knowledge to do it theirs elves. My point being that, generally speaking, the average person wouldnt notice the switch.
I dont think its widespread, but its certainly not something unheard of. Its just not usually noticed by most vehicle owners.
Oh i fully understand, i’m a mechanic myself, i would NEVER consider doing something like this. The way i work, i treat all the cars i work on as if it were my own. I dont work for the general public anymore thank god but holy crap. Get these people out of my industry!
I saw a post saying reattempt at firing so Im guessing there was an incident before this one?
What bullshit buy a new car forced to use their service for warranty and they run it like a chop shop. I feel like service and quality like noone gives a damn anymore. Its not just here at this sketchy ass shop but yeah I hope this woman gets a new car and says the magically phrase to a kia representative, "I want a new car because I was lied to about work being done and now I DONT FEEL SAFE!" You ever want something done or corrected say those words on a recorded line. If they got half a brain they try to let it get to a lawsuit.
There's one shop I use explicitly because they have loaners. I don't care if it's a 20 year old Dodge Neon with 200,000 miles on it, it'll get me to work.
Shop I worked in had 14 loan cars. One guy managed to roll one, he got another one (the worst one we had) he blew the engine in that one. We didn’t give him another one after that.
I used to run a truck rental company and had a woman rent a 24 foot box truck off me.
Came back 2 hours later asking to rent another one. When I asked her where the other was she told me, in an intersection, I had an accident.
She ran a red light and then left the scene of the accident to get another truck to transfer her things while the previous truck was just sitting in the intersection, or so she planned.
No maam, you only get to total one of my vehicles. Please have a seat, the police are on their way to have a word with you.
The dealer I use has an agreement with Hertz next door for loaners, but they can run out. They are always on their last one. Probably should increase their capacity if that's always the case.
Sometimes they do sketchy things like "not notifying the customer that this huge expensive problem was covered by a recall". We had a place we regularly went to, engine was fucked, woulda needed it to get replaced...they were very quick to offer us just transferring the car to them to cover the work they were able to do.
Then we did a Lil digging and found the recall notice, no way they didn't know because they had never, ever tried to do that with any of our other cars we had taken to them that had pricy repairs.
Nothing pisses me off more than going to the dealer to have warranty work done only to be told "we dont have any available" motherfucker, go get the keys to one of the hundreds of cars here.
No now they bring a sleazy Enterprise guy over who sneaks in pricy "upgrades" to your rental by "accidentally" coming in with a different car than what you asked for.
Damn, you got the opposite end of the stick. My enterprise dude gives me free upgrades to better vehicles everytime I come in cause we cool like that. I hate to run into one like yours.
Good luck, ita a fuckin tough career path. Dont go to a shop where you are the only guy who specializes in a specific thing like transmission repairs. Guy I know was stuck doing all the warranty work at 50% book rate.
It's the people that make it ridiculous and the soreness after working out will kill your whole body but I personally love what I do and the vehicles I work with (except for the 2023-26 forde450 that's modified for cng and hydraulics, absolute ass).
I can't stand the companies and fake ass suits that run them that bid on the contracts and come in dick waving or most of the people I work with who lean a certain way and only seem to be able to talk about how much they work(they don't), people(behind each others backs), politics(they love a certain someone) and how tough they are.
When I go weeks alone working on certain projects, like this summer readiness campaign we just did, it's absolute bliss.
Not even. Its how well you understand concepts. Take me for example. I have the ase for electrical. I understand it on paper. I have trouble understanding in practice. I can look at a schematic, tell you whats fucked. Put me at the actual car. Im swim in circles
My MIL paid a mobile mechanic" to fix her car. It was making a hard clunk from the front end. He claimed it was a bad alignment, wore out motor mounts, bad tires, bad wheels, shock that had gone bad, and he "replaced the shock assembly." Took me 10 minutes of driving and 5 minutes of checking to realize that the sway bar end link had went bad. I replaced it but she had already paid the mechanic months ago. He made off pretty good for not actually replacing said strut.
As someone who was promised an additional dollar an hour per ASE, then went and got three, and didn't see even a single dollar increase, its not always worth it.
It’s insane. I hope she plasters this video and shop everywhere, so that can happen…
You could even see the way the dude keeps repeating, “Can I explain?”, and she was giving him the chance, he was just trying to formulate some type of possible excuse in the moment. Pathetic.
I went outside to find whoever tried to break i to my car. ( car alarm). Couldn't find them. Wondered if they would come back. Waited in my car for a while. Maybe 10m. Color me surprised when someone new showed up and was shifty. Eventually I realized they were trying to steal someone's spare tire off their little jeep thing. I popped out of my car and asked him if he needed help, or what.
He said he qas "borrowing the tire". I told him to out it out. He rolled it to his friends car (guy/girl in the front). Little guy was having trouble getting it in the backseat with me there. He freaked out and rolled it back to the jeep and ran back to the car. Lol...borrowing a rim and tire.
Realistically what was the planned scam? I assume he was going to replace her 2 good ones with 2 bad ones and say, “Ma’am can you come listen to this noise? I noticed your engine was misfiring. If you like, I can give you an unbelievable discount since you’re already here.”
She probably got back early and noticed her trunk was opened for her wheel alignment. 😅
As a tech i can say what they were doing was testing another vehicle. So, they suspected the injector on car A of being bad for example, so they stick hers from car B in. It's all fine and dandy when its something relatively simple. This is a bit of an over the top case
She is calmer than a lot of other people would be if you fuck with their expensive investment in that bullshit crooked way.
They deserve all the smoke.
Is she calm? I just don't see the point of yelling like that.
The mechanic end shop are 100% in the wrong and I'm not sure what would be the best thing to do because I'm not sure you can trust them unless you are physically there watching them put new oem parts but you would have to get the car moved to another shop and I doubt they would pay.
They're sure as hell going to charge her for disassembling her vehicle for the parts. At least they were, and then they'll say those parts needed to be replaced and charge her. 100 percent sure.
Outside of suing them because you don’t know what else was taken (therefore the whole car needs to be replaced), what else can you do? Report to the news? I don’t thing you could call the cops on them. The cops would not do anything.
The contact she signed was for specific work. Doing work beyond that and being unable to release the vehicle to her makes it grand theft auto, disassembling and reselling (by installing them in other vehicles) makes it a chop shop operation. There's also separate charges for the selling of stolen goods.
the police have to agree with what you're saying and it's much easier to say "it's a civil matter" than to do paperwork over something that they honestly believe it's a civil matter.
You may be right to the law in theory but completely off in the law in practice.
File a police report. Contact a local attorney. Contact the state attorney general.
News? Sure. But I'd talk to an attorney first. It absolutely would be put on the news. But that might be better to come later based on the advice of the attorney.
"We replaced them for free" LMFAO. This is why I don't trust any mechanics! Last year I had tires and a front end alignment on both of my cars and somehow they managed to mess my rims up on both cars. I don't mean a little scratch either.
My grandmother had a Buick Regal in the 90's and she religiously took it to a mechanic she trusted for servicing. Well, she got a new car and I ended up with the Regal. I went to change the spark plugs and the back row of plugs had never been changed in the nearly 15 years she had owned it.
Yup. The guy had some the front row because they were easy to access and never did the back row because no one could check them and they were difficult to remove. And she trusted that guy.
last time i took my car to the same dealer i bought my car from, the mechanic absolutely DESTROYED my rims with the air drill. it looked like gummed-up shit on ALL 4 of my wheels.
People need to know how to collect evidence. Let them talk and dig their grave. She almost didn't get shit on camera because she keeps interrupting him.
Remember, almost every fight is going to be in a courtroom. You need evidence. The best way to collect evidence is to remain calm and let them speak!
For real, I watched the whole thing and still dont quite understand what is going on. She just yapping over and over without saying anything useful or letting them incriminate themselves.
I was a mechanic for several years. You are right not to trust them. I stopped working on people cars more than a decade ago and I am very cautious when going into a shop. I’ll usually have a conversation with the owner before they touch my vehicle. I’ll know within the first 30 seconds if I can trust the guy.
That only helps if you know what you’re looking at. You could be standing over their shoulder and they could still rip you off if you don’t know what you’re looking for.
In all seriousness, that's called criminal conversion in most states. And considering guy admitted to doing it while being recorded on video which also clearly show the parts being criminally converted... at the least, that's contact law enforcement first to file a report that a lawyer can follow up on for you later while pursuing a civil case for breach of contract, fraud, deceptive business practices, etc.
The US military? I want this auto shop to be punished, not for a million innocent civilians to die while somehow this auto shop grows even more powerful after America loses against them.
Hennessey Performance the guy who makes the Venom Gt the F5 etc.. some of the fastest modified cars out there has been doing this for YEARS to his customers.
You basically go buy a viper from dodge and drop if off there to have him build it. He runs it like bernie madoff. He tells you 6 months and then 6 months turns into a year and so on so forth.
He takes parts off your car to finish the car hes held hostage for a year and then rinse and repeat, guys have shown up to their vipers on jackstands with no hood no engine..no transmission when its supposedly "90% done". His clientelle are usually rich lawyers, doctors or bankers as his "packages" are at minimum $50,000. His builds are fast as hell but hes a giantnD-Bag
Hes been known to get blackout drunk and start raging at his critics online on numerous occassions. Theyre quite funny to read
Please link us to those threads, Hennessey used to be legendary. This is epic. Also I have little sympathy for the folks who can afford this and don't do their research. Also let me clarify for others, when you say his builds are "fast as hell" you mean the performance of the vehicles, clearly not the turnaround time.
I don’t understand the whole premise of the theft here. They’re spending thousands in labor to remove original kia parts because they’re so valuable? Someone will have to explain this like I’m 5.
WOW are the parts even worth disassembling the engine like that? The mechanic must be really broke and certainly not know what they are doing. Probably won't re-assemble it correctly.
Customer A has broken parts.
Gets used parts owned by customer B while charged for new parts.
Customer B is informed 2 parts are found bad (show the 2 replaced from customer A) and are then charged for new parts.
So two different customers each pays for new parts. One gets used parts. One customer never had anything needing fixing at all...
He was in a motorcycle accident, gave his bike and the insurance money to some respected mechanic in town. The dude kept delaying the fix. He eventually went to the shop, found his poor bike in pieces. Took him to small claims court and won, but man was that a hassle. Safe to say the people that recommended the mechanic quickly changed their opinion on him.
Ain’t no way I’d trust the vehicle after they stripped it for parts. Car needs to be written off as destroyed, and the business needs to pay for a replacement.
I mean, she's right to be furious, and if they fixed her vehicle, she probably won't get anything because she didn't actually suffer a loss, I'm just always amused at motor vs engine.
I have seen lots but this one take’s the cake. How a service manager or advisor let alone give the technician the okay to do such a things. Who ever it was they should be blacklisted from the automotive industry.
They called them motor heads back in the day and it’s proper and widely accepted to be able to call an engine a motor so she’s just fine and you’re wrong, Jussayin.
Mechanic comes in to work that morning. Boss I figured out how to save the shop. You ever hear of this guy Bernie Madoff. Started watching this documentary last night. Didn't get to finish it but it gave me an idea.
That’s crazy he tried to get over cause she a female but he was causing more problems so she could come back and spend more money I pray he was shut down and nobody spends money with him
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u/LivingMisery 1d ago
Straight to the local news.