| Around late January of 2010, I took my 2003 Honda Accord EX to this Tuffy in Troy, MI for brake services. My rear brakes had been making a scratching sound when applied, so my dad took the car to Tuffy Troy and left it with them overnight to diagnose. The next day they called my dad (while I'm at school) and said that everything associated with the brakes (pads, rotors, calipers, etc) was broken and needed to be repaired. Also, they said that while trying to move my car to inside their garage, the car failed to start. They said the engine had no oil in it at all and that destroyed the engine (but how did my dad drive it there w/o oil). They told my dad that we could have it replaced or come pick up the dead car. Constrained with no time (my dad works full time and I go to school full time) and zero car knowledge, my dad reluctantly agreed for the engine to be replaced. To reiterate, my car is a 2003 Honda Accord EX. It had 116,302 miles on it. I bought it used but it had a clean report and also an amazingly detailed and meticulous servicing history report that showed that every maintenance that ever needed to be done was done right on time, oftentimes even ahead of schedule (including a full history of oil changes done on time). After owning the car for over a year, it had never given me a single problem besides the brakes, which was my own fault for delaying a repair. The car had never once failed to start, and it had never, to the best of my knowledge leaked oil visibly. We went a few days later to the garage and the owner/manager showed the engine sitting outside the car. He pointed to it and tried to explain stuff to us, like "this part stopped moving, then this, then that, then the engine can't start." Either the same day or the next, he showed us my car, which was parked outside in the lot area, with the new engine in it. My original engine had ~116,000 miles on it and still ran perfectly. The engine he replaced it with was supposedly 40,000 miles only (with no paperwork to prove it), but with it car drove OK, but didn't accelerate nearly as fast, and was really shaky. We told the guy who showed us the car (not the manager, but a different guy) that the car was too shaky but he just shrugged it off, saying he didn't notice. We showed him again and insisted that he fix it. This guy suddenly says "I just remembered that one of your engine mounts was broken, and this is probably the cause of the problem." Since we were still in the lot outside by the car, he told us to meet him inside the shop (the shop area, not the garage where the cars get fixed). As we walked to the shop, he quickly went inside from the garage and closed the garage door. We met him inside and he had in his hand a cracked engine mount with liquid leaking from it. He told us that this very mount had come out of my car and it needed to be replaced. We came back a few days later after that engine mount had been installed. The car was still kind of shaky but much better than before the mount was "replaced." The bill for the all the brake work overall was $426.08. The bill for the replacement engine (the regular 4 cylinder, 2.4 L K-series that the Accord should have had) was $700 just for the engine itself, and the bill for the engine mount was a separate $162.51. The separate cost or labor for installing the engine was $945.60. To sum it up, I went in for a brake repair and came out with an engine replacement and a total bill of $2347.22. Before leaving, I asked the manager if I could somehow keep my old engine and he said something to the effect of "no, not right now, we have to do stuff with it." I'm not one to argue, so we left. I find it extremely hard to believe that my engine just suddenly ran out of oil and died over there. Unfortunately, my dad didn't want to deal with legal matters, so we politely paid the money. During the following month, the manager of the store told me to come in every week to have him look at the car and make sure the oil (in the "new" engine) wasn't leaking. I went every week and he would tell me something like "it's perfect, no oil leaking or burning." After a few weeks, I didn't see any need to go there anymore because everything was supposedly fine. During the whole ordeal, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau but they never replied to me or even did anything about it. Now, almost two years later, I happened to come across this website, so I want you all to know how Tuffy Troy operates. |
