What I’m currently going through with Hendrick Subaru
So, on Friday after work my 2019 Impreza would not start. For a month, I noticed that it wasn’t starting on the first try, but I was working out of state and was it could wait till I was back in Bham to address it.
I would have preferred to go to elemental garage but it was Friday night and they aren’t open on the weekends.
I had the car towed to Hendricks in Hoover.
I explained the problem with the car starting and specifically told them it wasn’t a battery issue because I’ve only had to jump the car off twice in two years and each time it was due to being home for a few days and not driving the car. In each case my neighbor used his jump start device thing and the car ran just fine after that.
On this occasion my car sat in the employee parking deck for twelve hours for my shift then again overnight till I met the tow truck there. That the battery might be flat at that point because it was also out in the heat wouldn’t have been a surprise to me, but I didn’t think it would be a problem beyond Hendricks to deal with.
So I get a call from them telling me that the problem was the battery and they replaced it and the car was ready for pick up.
I felt dumb because I was certain that it wasn’t the battery the whirring noise it was making when I tried to start it was new and not what the car did when the battery was flat.
I took another $60 uber to get the car. I paid for the battery and when I went to start the car it would not start. There were two service technicians who saw this and one said it definitely sounded like a starter problem.
Then they told me that Subaru starters never fail so this was an extraordinary situation. They said that they had started my car 9 times and it had started just fine for them. So they felt the starter was fine. I didn’t know the art of automotive repair included feeling. I didn’t think cars cared about my feelings. This was a weird thing to say because were they implying that it was my fault that the car didn’t start. And 9 times??? Really??
I was upset because they told me my car was fixed when it clearly wasn’t fixed and even charged me for a new battery that I’m not convinced that I needed but they insisted that I did need it so it was fine that I was charged for it but they still failed to fix the car.
The two technicians were full of excuses but no one said I’m sorry, our bad. I was relying on their expertise but so far I still had a broken car and was $300 poorer.
They gave me a loaner and told me the earliest they could work on it was Monday.
I worked Monday and Tuesday, Tuesday someone left me a voicemail but no information about my car, by the time I returned the call it was a few minutes before 6pm when they close.
This morning, I called and left a voicemail, but when I didn’t get a call back, I called to speak to a service manager and explain the situation.
He wasn’t much help and again wouldn’t admit that they had messed up. He even said they did me a favor putting a new battery in for $300 instead of repairing the starter for $800 and then telling me I needed to pay an extra $300 for a new battery. I really don’t see that the order in which I’m charged for unexpected repairs matters.
I went to them for their expertise. I expected they would be competent and could tell me what was wrong and fix it they gave me a long list of recommended service items so I thought they checked everything out so I don’t understand how they missed a bad starter.
I’m not an automotive expert but I thought that they run diagnostics and assess everything to find the problem, I was feeling like they were throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what would fix the car.
I also feel like they are desperately trying to hold on to the $300 they got out of a single mom, for the multi billion dollar corporation they work for while sacrificing the trust of a customer has in their business and ignoring that they badly disappoint my reasonable expectations.
Am I wrong to feel this way???
(I had to call back 3 times when talking to him, the first time was a bad connection, on the second time, I think he had just hung up on my cause I guess I wasn’t showing proper gratitude for the new battery I bought thinking it fixed my car, when it didn’t.)