Pramod Dibble

Review of Red McCombs Hyundai Northwest

The service department lied to my face!!

The service department lied to my face!!

tl,dr: The service department tried to convince me my washer fluid pump was bad and charge me $250 when it was working fine the whole time.

It's important to start this story with you knowing that I filled my washer fluid a week or two before taking my car in to the dealership. This will be important later.

I took my car in for routine maintenance; tire rotation, brake check, etc. I got a call saying that the windshield washer fluid pump was dead and that it would need to be replaced. They quoted me $250 for this service. I declined, figuring I'd try to do it myself for that price. I don't know that much about cars, but I have a friend who does and I wanted to try to use this experience to learn something about my car.

A couple weeks later my friend and I had my car jacked up with the wheel off and we were ready to install the new washer fluid pump which I had gotten for $23 on Amazon. Before installing the new one we tested the old one, just to make sure that that was the only issue. The old pump worked fine. It was then that we noticed that my washer fluid reservoir was completely empty. Remember from earlier when I said I had filled this a couple weeks beforehand? So did they empty my reservoir and then tell me the pump was dead so they could charge me $250 for $3 worth of washer fluid and the 20 seconds it takes to fill it? I can't prove that they did but I can't think of another explanation that makes sense.

Even giving them the benefit of the doubt and imagining this is incompetence and not fraud, they turn out looking pretty bad. Let's say they made an honest mistake and genuinely believed the pump was dead and needed changing. I got the part for $23 retail; they get a better price wholesale. Lifting the car, getting the wheel off, and removing the cover to the reservoir and pump system might take an experienced mechanic 5 minutes. It took my buddy 10. The pump is a snap-in piece and can be installed in 30 seconds. Five more minutes to replace the cover, reinstall the wheel and lower the car. All in this might take 20 mins to do, but lets say 30 mins to be charitable. Even billing $100 an hour this whole service runs $73; so why the $250 bill? What, Red McCombs doesn't have enough money? $80-$90 I can see for some markup, but a 3x increase is egregious.

Stay away. The people are friendly but they're going to charge you through the nose even for legitimate service, and maybe make stuff up to separate you from your last dollar.