Car's odometer increases by 90km after a night under "repair"

gaiscioch

When I arrived back from collecting my car at a "reputable" main dealer, I noticed that the difference between the odometer recorded on the main dealer's print out, and the kms on the car when I collected it was 90km more.
I left it with the dealer for a single day.

I immediately rang the business in question and a "Customer Service" employee said that it didn't make any sense and, then, when I insisted that this difference existed he suddenly "remembered" that another employee brought my car home with him to ensure that the repair they made to the oil worked and that the employee in question lived far from the dealer's garage. I mean, as an explanation for driving my car around the place when it's supposed to be under repair in their garage this ranks pretty high on the "screw you, overcharged customer" front.

Aside from never visiting the dealership in question again, what are my options?

pippip

I wouldn't expect them to take it home, thats a bit cheeky, but I would be well pissed if they hadn't brought it for a test drive to ensure all was ok before handing it back to me.

Depends on the problem too, what was it in for? I once had an oil pressure problem on the car that only appeared after a good run so the mechanic had to go for a long test drive to make sure the problem was fixed.

And I was very happy he did rather than just assuming it was repaired because they replaced a part. Nothing worse than getting a car back the problem is still there.

bazz26

Go in and speak with the Service Manager rather than a person who answers the phone. Ask them why it was driven 90 km to "check" it was running fine.

CIP4

Depends on the repair. I had an intermittent issue which a dealer wasn't sure if they had sorted so they asked could they give the car a good run to check it over they put 200km on it I was happy they done that though as I would rather it broke down while the mechanic drove it then me. I mean if it was a normal service 10km would have been more than enough. So basically it depends on what you were getting done. Not exactly the end of the world either way but I suppose they should have asked.

166man

I don't know, maybe I'm just being too easy going but if I got my car back after work done on it and it had 50 miles extra on the clock I'm not sure I'd really care too much.

As long as the work was done properly, checked properly and I got my car back in the condition I left it with the same amount of fuel in it, I wouldn't lose sleep over it..............

sunnysoutheast

Something I always do, now, is take a photo of the dash parked outside the garage showing the mileage whenever I drop off for service. It's a tip someone gave me once.

When I was in the UK I was able to show that a local indy garage - well recommended - had driven my car for >90 miles when it was supposed to be in for a timing belt change. When I threatened to go to trading standards they took £100 off the bill and gave me a letter admitting that they had driven it on that day (for speed cameras etc.). I can't imagine it was the first time it had happened.

Toyotafanboi

gaiscioch wrote: »

Aside from never visiting the dealership in question again, what are my options?

what would you like? an apology? a cash reimbursement for 90kms worth of wear and tear? a tenner for diesel?

it doesn't sound too justified and it's a little unprofessional, but i can't see you standing to gain anything from this point onwards.

it would be reasonably common practice for a mechanic to take a car home to either try chase up an intermittent problem or to ensure one is fixed, but without the owners permission, it's merely sloppy practice.

Kevin!

It's imperative for some repairs or for diagnosing faults to get a decent drive in the car to establish that it's been fixed/what the issue is - mechanics are insured to drive your vehicle when working for the business so I see no issue in this practice.

I'd rather they drove my car on to ensure a fault has been cleared as opposed to getting it back and the fault reappearing in a few KM's

biko

90k is a long drive. Assuming OP is a Dub it's driving from Dublin city centre to Naas and back.

George Dalton

What was the nature of the repair that was carried out?

I very regularly bring customer's cars home with me, in fact I have one home with me this evening. An extended test drive is sometimes necessary to verify a repair. In these cases it can make sense for one of the employees to bring the car home. The alternative is for a mechanic to drive around for an hour during the working day and bill you for an hour's labour.

I'm not saying that an extended test drive was needed here because you haven't said what was wrong with the car. The garage also should have checked and cleared it with you or any other customer before doing it, that much is obvious. They may do so in future after this episode :pac:

MakkaaPakkaa

gaiscioch wrote: »

When I arrived back from collecting my car at a "reputable" main dealer, I noticed that the difference between the odometer recorded on the main dealer's print out, and the kms on the car when I collected it was 90km more.
I left it with the dealer for a single day.

I immediately rang the business in question and a "Customer Service" employee said that it didn't make any sense and, then, when I insisted that this difference existed he suddenly "remembered" that another employee brought my car home with him to ensure that the repair they made to the oil worked and that the employee in question lived far from the dealer's garage. I mean, as an explanation for driving my car around the place when it's supposed to be under repair in their garage this ranks pretty high on the "screw you, overcharged customer" front.

Aside from never visiting the dealership in question again, what are my options?

The Valet from Ferris Bueller's Day Off must have started working there.....

bmm

gaiscioch wrote: »

Aside from never visiting the dealership in question again, what are my options?

Name and shame the dealership! Considering they have owned up already!

Toyotafanboi

bmm wrote: »

Name and shame the dealership! Considering they have owned up already!

name and shame them for doing a thorough job?

go in and speak to the service manager ffs.

could have been a genuine error where the service adviser forgot to phone and ask for permission, for example.

In the few years i spend as a service adviser, i never had a customer refuse it or question the concept. most are delighted that a mechanic will be doing an extended test drive on their car for free.

CiniO

Toyotafanboi wrote: »

In the few years i spend as a service adviser, i never had a customer refuse it or question the concept. most are delighted that a mechanic will be doing an extended test drive on their car for free.

Maybe most would be delighted, but some wouldn't.
I wouldn't fancy mechanic taking my car any further than for few minutes outside the garage, and if they asked for permission to take it further I would refuse, that's why they always should ask for permission.

Toyotafanboi

CiniO wrote: »

Maybe most would be delighted, but some wouldn't.
I wouldn't fancy mechanic taking my car any further than for few minutes outside the garage, and if they asked for permission to take it further I would refuse, that's why they always should ask for permission.

Of course you would refuse. Why wouldn't you want it?

He's not going to jeopardise his career by rallying it, if he works for a franchise he's probably driven that same model a thousand times before and couldn't be bothered with anything other than finding the fault.

If he damages it, the garage will have insurance on it. It'd usually only be a long standing or head mechanic taking it home. It's not like they are handing out brand new cars to 17 year old apprentices or anything.

Roger Mellie Man on the Telly

I wouldn't mind, although I have only a vague idea of the mileage on my car. I'd have no idea if the mechanic took it to the other end of the country.

I can see how people of a different disposition would be irked however.

Cee-Jay-Cee

There's no point in people speculating till the OP comes back and states what the car was actually in for.

Gumbo

My mate is a mechanic with Ford, he very regularly has to take cars home and drive them for a few days, sometimes 3 days at a time.

It's pretty common tbh.

My ML is in with my mechanic in Finglas for a power loss issue,,and he said he will be driving it home to ratoath to get a clear idea at when the power drops etc

FortySeven

Cee-Jay-Cee wrote: »

There's no point in people speculating till the OP comes back and states what the car was actually in for.

Exactly. It is standard practice for certain repairs to ensure that faults will not arise. A quick spin around the block is not enough. Other times an extended test drive can be the only way to find intermittent faults. I have had my car taken home by a garage and consider it best practice, I hope it got a good thrashing too. Last thing I want is a car that went round the block fine and fails 50 miles down the road.

the_syco

Was the issue noticeable without it been driven? Could have been a short drive to find the issue, and another short drive to ensure the issue was fixed.

Although, in saying that, if you're driving something like a beamer or an Audi, mark the date on the fridge, so you know who to call should you get any speeding fines...

Sounds like it could be a possibility that, even if the car only needed a 5-10 minute test drive, your car was the last car they had a chance to look at that day, so to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, the mechanic just drove it home and back, instead of putting it off til the morning. That way he could get stuck into the next car the following morning.

Ask them to refund you a tenner for diesel if you're that hard pressed but, in all honesty, if the issue was sorted out properly, and you know a mechanic has drove your car for at least an hour, I'd take that as a bit of peace of mind, myself, personally.

keithclancy

I left my car in to get a few bits done.

Asked if everything was good.

In really broken English

200 .. no problem .. drive good ..

Don't think i'd care that much unless there was a crazy amount of mileage put on it by the garage.

CJhaughey

I wouldn't care what mileage they put on it as long as the problem was solved.

OldMrBrennan83

This post has been deleted.

Jayop

I spent about 8 years working in main dealer service departments and drove customers cars home about 30% of the time to ensure repairs were completed and that any intermittent faults were cured. It's standard practice.

Some people love moaning and you'll probably go around moaning to everyone who will listen and tarnishing the name of this garage without really knowing what you're talking about.

My journey would be a 70km round trip too, I lived the furthest away so that's why I was always asked to do it.

OldMrBrennan83

This post has been deleted.

jca

Patww79 wrote: »

Mate of mines Mrs used to work on the front desk at a main dealers and they'd let her bring customer cars home regularly if it was something nice and it wasn't being collected until the next day. Got a spin out of a few of them myself.

Not the answer the op wants to hear...

ScouseMouse

George Dalton wrote: »

What was the nature of the repair that was carried out?

I very regularly bring customer's cars home with me, in fact I have one home with me this evening. An extended test drive is sometimes necessary to verify a repair. In these cases it can make sense for one of the employees to bring the car home. The alternative is for a mechanic to drive around for an hour during the working day and bill you for an hour's labour.

I'm not saying that an extended test drive was needed here because you haven't said what was wrong with the car. The garage also should have checked and cleared it with you or any other customer before doing it, that much is obvious. They may do so in future after this episode :pac:

Funny you should say that George. That garage you recommended for my mondeo has my car and took it home last night. With it being the DPF sensor and engine malfunction warnings, they need to drive it to see the fault is really fixed. Hope to have it back today. I agree there are reasons to drive a customers car home, but it would be bad form not to tell the customer about it.

bucketybuck

CiniO wrote: »

Maybe most would be delighted, but some wouldn't.
I wouldn't fancy mechanic taking my car any further than for few minutes outside the garage, and if they asked for permission to take it further I would refuse, that's why they always should ask for permission.

And you would probably be the first to moan and whinge if a fault reoccurred after a long drive. :rolleyes: A few minutes outside the garage isn't worth a **** if you want to get everything heated up or try to find those noises that only come in at 90/100 kph.

There are lots of very good reasons for the mechanic to take the car for a good long drive, and frankly it isn't something that I would necessarily tell the customer about. Do you want the damn thing fixed or not?

Besides, there is a far simpler reason for the disparity in the mileage. The OP says he only noted a difference between the dealer paperwork and the mileage on the dash, he didn't actually know the original mileage himself. But the dealers jobcard could easily have the wrong mileage entered! Dealers record mileages but it isn't a legal requirement or anything, and if doing ten things at once a service advisor could easily have forgotten the exact figure when entering it on the system. He could have checked the dash, got back to the office and remembered it to the nearest thousand but not to the nearest tens of kms. So he just enters the bit he does know and fudges the rest. If the actual mileage is 42395, he remembers its 423 something, so enters 42300 on the system. Its the 42 bit thats important, that fact that the recorded mileage is now 90kms out actually has no importance whatsoever.

lawred2

gaiscioch wrote: »

When I arrived back from collecting my car at a "reputable" main dealer, I noticed that the difference between the odometer recorded on the main dealer's print out, and the kms on the car when I collected it was 90km more.
I left it with the dealer for a single day.

I immediately rang the business in question and a "Customer Service" employee said that it didn't make any sense and, then, when I insisted that this difference existed he suddenly "remembered" that another employee brought my car home with him to ensure that the repair they made to the oil worked and that the employee in question lived far from the dealer's garage. I mean, as an explanation for driving my car around the place when it's supposed to be under repair in their garage this ranks pretty high on the "screw you, overcharged customer" front.

Aside from never visiting the dealership in question again, what are my options?

what type of car was it?

H3llR4iser

If I had a bigger job done - like timing chain, gearbox or clutch, I would be really worried if the garage didn't take the car for a long run afterwards.

Many issues only show up after everything gets plenty of heat in, or at specific speeds. I recently had the infamous M32 gearbox issue solved - but how I found out my bearings were going is important: 5th and 6th would only start whining after a 30+ minutes drive at motorway speeds. You could drive around town forever and never notice the issue, or do 25/30 km of cruising without a problem.

For the ones who work in IT, think about a stress test: if you build/repair a PC, more often than not the first thing you do is let it crunch some heavy processing for a few hours, to make sure everything is nice and stable; 5 minutes of SuperPI aren't gonna yield much of a result.

Last, bit of information many might not be aware of: the car's mileage is also stored in the ECU, and it is readable via an ODB scanner. This value is usually quite a bit lower than the one on the odometer, which normally over reads just like the speedometer. Just so you know, in case you'd notice the discrepancy in the future and think there's some foul play involved.

Oh, and a while ago I left the 159 in the car wash for a full valet - when I collected it read 7km more. Now that's hard to justify

duffman3833

i wouldn't worry about that, id be asking questions tho if they used a tank of fuel, so i normally send me car in with fuel on the red line

martinr5232

duffman3833 wrote:

i wouldn't worry about that, id be asking questions tho if they used a tank of fuel, so i normally send me car in with fuel on the red line

Thats clever so do you think the garage should pay for the privalige of test driving your car.

If im working on a car and the fuel light is on it wont be driven simple as.

duffman3833

martinr5232 wrote: »

Thats clever so do you think the garage should pay for the privalige of test driving your car.

If im working on a car and the fuel light is on it wont be driven simple as.

they don't need to go on test drive that requires a quarter tank of fuel so there is enough in the tank when i leave car in. If they need more, they pay, not me

Kevin!

duffman3833 wrote: »

they don't need to go on test drive that requires a quarter tank of fuel so there is enough in the tank when i leave car in. If they need more, they pay, not me

oh yes I see the logic, so they can run it to empty and pull in all the dirt from the bottom of the fuel tank and cause more damage than an extra fiver in petrol

I can't believe some of the complaints in this thread, and its from the same customers that would threaten the small claims court if something did go wrong a short time after and would then be questioning why it wasn't test driven

Jesus.

Honestly OP I think you're freaking out over nothing. So they put up a few miles on it. So what? A decent mechanic will do such to make sure his repair holds. The chap on my street has different cars home every night because he says its the only feasible way he can get to give them a proper test run after fixing them. Its not practical be driving every car they have up and down the road during working hours. Sounds to me like your garage was being thorough.

Nothing to worry about lad

duffman3833

Kevin! wrote: »

oh yes I see the logic, so they can run it to empty and pull in all the dirt from the bottom of the fuel tank and cause more damage than an extra fiver in petrol

a quarter of thank should get them 100km to empty on most cars, so shouldn't need to drive it more than that. Also if they (the mechanics) did run the car dry that would be their fault and the garage would be at fault.

bucketybuck

duffman3833 wrote: »

they don't need to go on test drive that requires a quarter tank of fuel so there is enough in the tank when i leave car in. If they need more, they pay, not me

Yeah, you go man, fight the power! Always good to get one over on those buggers who are able to fix your car when you can't do it yourself.

They should be proud to have the privilege of trying to fix your car, and of course they should be out of pocket for deigning to make sure it is actually fixed. The cheek of them.

Jesus.

Think that's the first time I've commented on an OP, gone back and read through the thread and found that pretty much everyone agrees with me. Must be getting soft

coolisin

I've no problem with them taking the car for a spin when it's required.

I do have a problem with a mechanic using my car for his commute.
Which happened to me, in for body shop work.
Mechanic brings it home.
I left it in with half a tank got it back with min range.

I know he brought it home cause I saw the route it took.
Saw where it was parked.

I told the main dealer I wasn't happy.
I got an hmmm so reply.

duffman3833

bucketybuck wrote: »

Yeah, you go man, fight the power! Always good to get one over on those buggers who are able to fix your car when you can't do it yourself.

They should be proud to have the privilege of trying to fix your car, and of course they should be out of pocket for deigning to make sure it is actually fixed. The cheek of them.

Do they need to do 90km? If car not warmed up by first 10 to 20km then they should check again, 90km is for me going from louth to dublin and most of way back. No test drive should be that long

bucketybuck

They don't need to do anything, they are only out to screw you over and you have to watch them scammers at every turn, amiright? :pac:

Kenny Logins

166man wrote: »

I don't know, maybe I'm just being too easy going but if I got my car back after work done on it and it had 50 miles extra on the clock I'm not sure I'd really care too much.

As long as the work was done properly, checked properly and I got my car back in the condition I left it with the same amount of fuel in it, I wouldn't lose sleep over it..............

TBH I'd be more pissed off if the issue reappeared because the car wasn't test-driven.

jca

coolisin wrote: »

I've no problem with them taking the car for a spin when it's required.

I do have a problem with a mechanic using my car for his commute.
Which happened to me, in for body shop work.
Mechanic brings it home.
I left it in with half a tank got it back with min range.

I know he brought it home cause I saw the route it took.
Saw where it was parked.

I told the main dealer I wasn't happy.
I got an hmmm so reply.

How did you know all that? Have you a tracking device fitted?

Jayop

coolisin wrote: »

I've no problem with them taking the car for a spin when it's required.

I do have a problem with a mechanic using my car for his commute.
Which happened to me, in for body shop work.
Mechanic brings it home.
I left it in with half a tank got it back with min range.

I know he brought it home cause I saw the route it took.
Saw where it was parked.

I told the main dealer I wasn't happy.
I got an hmmm so reply.

Again depends on the repair. If it's something like touch up work then no test drive should be required, but if the car was in a bad smash and he was testing was it straight then I'd have no issue with him running it.

pred racer

Honestly, I wouldn't care if they took it to Donegal and back.
90kms not worth worrying about.
I was once told by a garage that my car had a high speed wobble but it's sorted now. I asked how high speed, they said over 160kph, I was happy it was sorted

jca

pred racer wrote: »

Honestly, I wouldn't care if they took it to Donegal and back.
90kms not worth worrying about.
I was once told by a garage that my car had a high speed wobble but it's sorted now. I asked how high speed, they said over 160kph, I was happy it was sorted

It was probably used to being driven at speed given your user name:):)

George Dalton

pred racer wrote: »

Honestly, I wouldn't care if they took it to Donegal and back.
90kms not worth worrying about.
I was once told by a garage that my car had a high speed wobble but it's sorted now. I asked how high speed, they said over 160kph, I was happy it was sorted

That's because they knew the type of fella they were dealing with.

pred racer

George Dalton wrote: »

That's because they knew the type of fella they were dealing with.

I also liked the balance test, "thats ok to 110"
Km I asked,
Nah Miles:D

Thats service!

corks finest

sunnysoutheast wrote: »

Something I always do, now, is take a photo of the dash parked outside the garage showing the mileage whenever I drop off for service. It's a tip someone gave me once.

When I was in the UK I was able to show that a local indy garage - well recommended - had driven my car for >90 miles when it was supposed to be in for a timing belt change. When I threatened to go to trading standards they took £100 off the bill and gave me a letter admitting that they had driven it on that day (for speed cameras etc.). I can't imagine it was the first time it had happened.

I also do it,,,and what if garage guy picked up a speeding ticket/ traffic infringement

sunnysoutheast

corks finest wrote: »

I also do it,,,and what if garage guy picked up a speeding ticket/ traffic infringement

Yes that was one of my concerns at the time but they just took the absolute p*ss with it, there was no diagnosis needed so they'd obviously just used my car to run around in for the day.

There's no issue with test drives if an issue has to be identified, but I'd also be concerned about the insurance implications if a car is stolen/trashed while parked outside some random unknown mechanic's house overnight rather than the garage's business premises.