July 24th, 2009 • by David Zatz
A few weeks ago, my PT Cruiser GT started shimmying like mad on the highway. I pulled over, then made it to the next exit and limped home. It didn’t stop shimmying, the steering wheel pulling an inch over one way and then back the other.
I took it down to the tire shop, assuming that it might be a tire-unrelated issue but that, since they had recently rotated and balanced the tires, it might be a weight falling off (which has happened to me). They pronounced the wheel bent, but rebalanced it.
That lasted until the next highway drive. I returned it and asked them to look at the suspension and such for other problems, but they insisted it was the wheel. Until now, I hadn’t paid a penny for the rework.
The next time I took it down to the shop three blocks away. They came back with the same diagnosis and I paid $30 to have the tires rebalanced.
It didn’t work.
The next stop was to Teterboro Chrysler, my last stop before sending the much-accused wheel to a straightener in Fairfield. My request was simple: put the car onto a lift and check things out. I asked for “no road test.”
It took the mechanic almost a minute to find the problem, including putting the car onto the left. The first thing he did was to spin the wheels to visually observe them. One of the front wheels had a bad caliper which, when heated, caused a bad chatter, which has roughly the same symptoms as shimmy.
The cost for replacing the caliper is less than rebending the wheel, though to be fair, I’ll probably need a new disc, too.
The moral of the story is in the title. An extra minute of diagnosis can save an hour of repair.
Now, why didn’t the two other mechanics (three, really, since I had different people on each trip) take two seconds to spin the wheel? (Which, incidentally, Teterboro’s mechanic found to be just fine.) There was a lucrative brake job in front of them – and they gave it up for free work.
June 4th, 2009 • by David Zatz
On the one hand, dealers employ large numbers of mechanics and salesmen, and more dealerships means more choices for customers. If you’ve been burned by one Chrysler or GM dealership, you can try another nearby, in most of the country. If you need to get something fixed, the proliferation of shops means you can usually find a repair shop nearby – unlike, say, a Subaru owner.
But the dealerships being dropped are ingenuous when they try to rely on their reputation as honest small-town businessmen who have deep roots in the community. Sure, some of them are. As far as I can tell. None of the ones I personally know of which are being booted can make that claim. Some of them have been around for a long time, but they’re run by sleazy characters and make life hard on their customers and employees.
Honest mechanics have told me stories about how they’d charge a customer for parts and never install them. How they’d charge each customer for fluids and supplies that were spread across dozens of people. Stories of untrained kids botching warranty repairs that Chrysler had to pay for. Then there’s the parts markup of 100% – 300% above list price, at least according to the parts counter guy at one of the dealerships losing their franchise.
Of course, there are also the customer stories. Dealers pretending the warranty didn’t cover something so they could charge an outrageous fee. Constantly-botched jobs. High-pressure sales pitches. Stealing customers’ keys. Contracts that change or don’t reflect the verbal deal. Far too many dealers engage in these sleazy tactics. The ability for dealers to be profitable without them is a big reason why Chrysler is dropping so many dealers.
I’m sure there was some politics involved, though not the conspiracy-theorist type of politics. Internal Chrysler politics are much more likely to be an issue. Did the dealer scoff at the idea of carrying another Chrysler marque? Did they stand up and demand higher quality product during the Daimler years? Did they protest the wrong program or refuse to buy extra stock when the company was pushing it? I suspect those are potent issues.
It would probably have helped if Chrysler had made every dealer’s customer ratings, including the fix-it-the-first-time scores, public. I haven’t heard any stories (yet) about five star dealers being closed down.
In the end, it’s hard to say whether every decision was right and proper. I doubt it, but I think the majority probably were. The news media don’t have time to really investigate the stories of each individual tearjerker, to find out whether the sobbing or angry dealership owner really was a pillar of the community – or a guy who’d be should’ve been turned into a pillar of salt.
Dealers are exceedingly important, and I think Chrysler and GM know that. Customers don’t know anything about Chrysler or GM; they know about the dealer they have. If the dealer treats them like dirt, they don’t say “my Chevy dealer treats me like dirt.” They say, “Chevy treats me like dirt.”
If a dealer repeatedly fails to fix a problem, or breaks a car when fixing something else, the customer blames the manufacturer, not the dealer.
Chrysler and GM have had poor communications around the dealer franchises, but they have good reasons for wanting to be able to cast off the dealers that give them a bad rep. I, for one, am hoping they are actually casting off those dealers – and only those dealers.
