Complaint Review: Finlay Chevrolet

The service department at Findlay Chevrolet is like the Donald Trump of car dealerships: they are careless, incompetent, and unwilling to admit their mistakes. I have just had the single worst experience at a service department that I've ever had in my entire life -- so much so that I will NEVER take my car here for service again, I will NEVER purchase a car from ANY Findlay dealership, and I will shout from the rooftops about my negative experience to anyone within earshot as loudly and as often as I possibly can.

My husband's aging H3 started sputtering on the drive home from the airport a couple of weeks ago so we knew something was e seriously wrong with his beloved car. We took it into Findlay because they are the only mechanics authorized to work on the H3 and we've had previous semi-positive experiences.

After some diagnostics it turned out that his car needed a brand new transmission as well as new rear brakes, to the tune of $6,900. Benny, our service rep, also said we needed new wiper blades and -- get this -- wanted to charge us for them. After asking if they could throw the wipers in for free (come on now, we were spending some serious dough here), they nicely agreed. Since the car needed some major work, we had to leave it for about a week.

A couple of days after dropping it off, my husband realized he left his office keycard and swung by the dealership unannounced on the way to work one morning to pick it up. He and Benny walked over to his car and THERE WAS AN EMPLOYEE SLEEPING IN THE FRONT SEAT OF OUR CAR! Yes folks, an employee was asleep in our vehicle. Benny was pretty upset about it but my husband, who is a really chill guy, thought it was bad but didn't cause a stink over it. When he told me about it, I was ballistic. I felt so violated, and it wasn't even my personal car. (If it had been MY car, I can't even begin to imagine what I would've done). To be fair, Nick the manager and Benny were both very apologetic and seriously concerned about the napping incident (and the employee no longer works there, and Nick knocked some money off our bill, which I very much appreciated), but I still am in total shock that a worker thought it was okay to use a customer's car as his personal napping spot. Heck, I guess we needed to be charging to run our car hotel!  

Fast forward a week: we go to pick up our car because it's ready. My husband starts driving his car and he says he's fighting the wheel because the alignment is so far off, his brake pedal is making this awful squeaking noise, and the a/c no longer works. He immediately tries to call the dealership and leaves several messages and never gets the courtesy of a reply. He takes the car back and leaves it for repair -- again.

We get a call later and they agree to fix the brakes but say that they had nothing to do with the alignment getting out of whack and the a/c no longer working. In fact, they wanted to charge us $80 to align the car, and they refused to fix the a/c issue. Call me crazy, but I have never in my life heard of a car being knocked out of alignment simply from being parked at a dealership for a week. Nick tried to blow us off and swore that the a/c problem is "a common issue with Hummers," and refused to take any responsibility whatsoever to the alignment issue telling us that there's "no way" they could've caused it because they were "working on a different area" of the car. GET REAL!

This is a textbook example of a gross mishandling of a customer service issue. I felt like everyone there was calling us both liars. I will 100% swear under oath that the car was in perfect alignment and the cooling system was functioning when we originally dropped off the car for service, but I shouldn't have to do that. The service department needs to take pride in their work and learn some basic customer service skills. They did begrudgingly agree to fix the alignment for free (probably because we both were really, REALLY angry about this whole thing), but they still refused to take any responsibility for the a/c malfunction. It's just SUPER suspicious because of the timing, and there's no denying that. I plan to take the car in to another mechanic to see what they say. I've had other car loving friends tell me that if someone didn't reconnect the wires correctly after replacing a transmission that it absolutely could cause the a/c to stop working. I suspect that's what's going on here.

After all, there was at least one employee sleeping on the job.

As a final insult as we were walking out today, Benny actually had the nerve to say, and I quote, "if you have any issues or problems, let me know." Are you KIDDING ME? I turned to say that yeah, we did have a problem with the a/c not working but my husband stopped me and said "he knows." Don't pretend to care if you don't really care.

I left the dealership very angry; fuming, actually. Not a great way to treat a customer, especially one who is VERY vocal on social media and in the Las Vegas community in general.

Avoid this place at all costs.