u/Any_Leg_1998

Haha I knew it, I knew he was an inside plant from the beginning:)

Pretty insane that he threw boiling water on his wife and broke his daughters collarbone.

Christopher Nolan didn't even make his Batman trilogy comic book accurate, but all 3 movies are still legendary.

Posting this partly as a warning and partly to ask if anyone else has dealt with this location, because the experience was bad enough that I'm still kind of in disbelief.

Quick background on how I ended up there: my car broke down on the way through the area, I waited six hours for a tow, and by the time I got picked up I was exhausted and just chose the State College Pep Boys out of desperation rather than research. I've since moved out of the area, so I'm now three hours away in Pittsburgh, which made everything that followed worse.

I dropped the car off on June 3rd for a water pump replacement — a job that's normally 4–5 hours of labor. I didn't get it back until June 27th. Almost four weeks for a half-day repair.

The communication was nonexistent. In that entire month they called me exactly once. Every other update, I had to chase down myself, and every time the answer was a vague "next week" or "Saturday" that never panned out. I was never given a written estimate the whole time. I only found out the mechanic working on my car had quit — during the second week — because I called and asked. They didn't tell me that, didn't tell me what it meant for my timeline, and when the car was finally done, they didn't even call to say it was ready. I had to call, again, to find that out.

Then I picked it up. When I got the car back, there were hoses left disconnected and clamps that weren't properly secured — I had to reconnect their own work myself. About two hours into the drive home, a check engine light came on that wasn't there when I dropped it off. So now, on top of everything, I'm dealing with a new fault that didn't exist before they touched the car.

If you need real work done and you need your car back in a reasonable timeframe (WITH BASIC COMMUNICATION), look somewhere else. You will genuinely regret leaving your cat here.

Update:

Got it scanned. It pulled multiple codes — mass air flow (P0101), boost pressure not reaching range (P0299), and EVAP (P0441) — and there's now a whooshing sound under acceleration. For anyone who knows these cars, that combo points to a boost/intake leak: the intake has to come partway apart to reach the water pump, and it clearly wasn't put back together right. On closer look there were also missing screws.

So the check engine light wasn't nothing. They handed the car back with an actual intake leak I now have to pay someone else to fix. Trying to find a shop in Pittsburgh to sort it out, and looking into recovering the cost from them.

If anyone here has gotten this location's corporate office to actually do something, I'd like to hear how it went.

Update 2:

Pep Boys responded to my Google review, so I emailed their corporate team with the details and got a case number opened. Shortly after, I got a call from the State College store directly (The manager).

It did not go how you'd hope. The call was mostly excuses — including for the lack of communication — rather than any real acknowledgment of what happened. I was told that the only way to get the problem fixed was to bring the car back to this store or to another Pep Boys, which is a tough ask considering I moved three hours away largely because of how long they kept it in the first place.

She did mention they'd taken $400 off the original bill because the repair dragged on so long. I'll give credit where it's due there — but a discount for being slow doesn't address the actual problem. I got the car back with disconnected hoses, untightened clamps, and missing screws, then a check engine light and a boost/intake leak that wasn't there before.

Knocking money off for the delay isn't the same as owning the fact that they handed the car back in worse shape than I dropped it off in — which nobody on the call acknowledged at all. I was also told the car had been "run for 30 minutes," as if that settled it.

So that's where things stand: a damaged car, and the proposed fix is to drive it back to the people who damaged it. I've got everything documented with corporate now and I'm looking into getting it diagnosed and repaired by an independent shop here in Pittsburgh.

PLEASE DO NOT BRING YOUR VEHICLE HERE, These guys cant even take basic accountability.