| rev:text
| - This review is for their service center.
In 2014, a little over a year ago, I inherited a 2005 Touareg from my kind parents. As a side effect, I also inherited the maintenance costs of the Touareg as well.
AutoNation successfully changed my alternator and some belt related to the alternator, I believe, at a reasonable price (for a VW and a dealer). I'd also had them do a few other repairs that came up, such as replacing one of the headlamps (which the manual strongly recommends not doing yourself, since they contain Xenon gas or something like that). All of this stuff went just fine with them, warranting a 4 if not 5 star review.
However, my most recent visit with them left me feeling very uneasy. I had a warning light on that said there was an airbag fault. When I brought it in to them, they told me that I had to do a $1000+ repair to fix the issue. Their claim was that a component under the seat needed to be replaced, which is not totally out of the question, as this model did have a manufacturer recall within a year or two of building the car (so 2006-2007), to replace an airbag-related part under the seat. However, 2 claims that they made on this visit did not correspond with my understanding of the Touareg nor with reality.
(1) They claimed it would take over 5 hours of labor to remove the driver side seat (which is required to replace that component, if it needed to be replaced). This seemed incorrect, since in previous work done when the battery was replaced (the battery is under the seat), 1 hour of work was billed. So, even if that component needed replacement, trying to bill 5+ hours of labor seemed dishonest to me.
(2) I asked "Are you sure it needs replacement? A VW person I spoke with said airbag faults can be reset in the ODB-2 and if the warning doesn't come back, you're going to be fine. If it does, then of course you need to take action." They insisted "Without a doubt, its going to come back anyway, so may as well just fix it now." Since $1000 is not chump change to me, I decided to go with my instincts and find out. What I found was that, several months down the line, the issue has not resurfaced.
The other thing I didn't like was how the rep tried to pressure me with fear of how dangerous driving without an airbag would be. "I'd hate it if you got into an accident and it was more serious because we didn't fix this." Yeah, of course, and so would I. She mentioned it several times in a "sales-y" way, which honestly did not really correspond to my past experience with them.
So, I still gave these guys 3 stars, because my previous work with them had been reasonable -- I'd realistically put it at 2.5 if we could give half stars. But I didn't like feeling lied to.
I know everyone makes mistakes, but a $1000 suggested repair that ended up not being actually a relevant issue at all, is kinda a big deal. I'd like to keep using AutoNation, since they're a bit closer to me, and I was already comfortable using them, but its already been over 24 hours since I called them to try and come up with a reasonable compromise to make up for the last service they did for me without a call back, so I now have an appointment with Findlay to look at the current issues I'm having with the car.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)