Stephen Pester

Review of Calgary BMW

Bought a used car from Calgary BMW end of July. I ...

Bought a used car from Calgary BMW end of July. I was told by my sales person that the car required a valve cover gasket, and that the cost would be $1200 to change this gasket, so that would be $1200 that we could not negotiate in the price of the vehicle. I was okay with this because I obviously wanted the car to be in good running condition once I bought it. Less than 500km later I had the car at Motorwerkes (very reputable BMW shop) to have a carbon clean done. Once they removed the intake manifold they could see there was oil on the top side of my valve cover and upon inspection they noticed a hairline crack in the cover itself. I opted to have them fix it at this time to avoid doing any further damage (since the oil was leaking down the plug tubes and on one of the turbos) I contacted my sales person at Calgary BMW and he told me that the shop foreman suggested that they could have misdiagnosed the problem in the first place, Motorwerkes figured the same. Also was told that it is not best practice to replace a gasket on an older plastic valve cover since they become brittle over time since they are exposed to hot and cold conditions. After taking BMW my old valve cover and bill from Motorwerkes as proof, (motorwerkes charged $1200, which included a brand new OEM valve cover and gasket, BMW charged the same for just a gasket) BMW offered me a whopping $250 credit to my account, which is just over an hour of their shop labour. Needless to say I am not at all pleased with my experience at this particular BMW, I would strongly suggest against dealing with them, especially the service dept. I talked to a service manager named Nikki and she couldn't help me what so ever. They messed up, misdiagnosed or cracked the brittle original valve cover after they supposedly changed the gasket, and offered next to nothing as compensation for their mistake. Very poor service.