Yep. It's been a pain in the balls.
Is the entire car being rebuilt!? [emoji15]
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Nah.
The timing belt tensioner doo-hickey broke, which broke the timing belt, which in turn wreaked havoc with valves or some other engine parts.
The shop is a small mom-and-pop operation. Just two bays / lifts. Run by a husband (mechanic) and his wife (shop manager). They told us it would be an expensive repair, and it would take a few weeks...
So, a lot's happened since then. It's been a bit of a tragic comedy. I can't even be sure I remember all the events in the correct order, but here goes...
They said they'd give us a loaner car, one of the cars that they owned, an Infiniti G35 they bought from a customer who didn't think it was worth fixing. They just needed to get the title transferred, get it registered with the state, get it running again, and get it inspected. It was actually one of the cars we considered buying for my son, before we bought the one they're supposed to be fixing.
But then, they had some big marital spat, he moved out for a couple days, and she wasn't coming into the shop. So that slowed things down for about a week.
Then, his mom, who has Parkinsons, went into the hospital. It's a long story, but his brother was supposed to be taking care of the mom, but instead he just took all her money and left her alone to die, so that was a big problem that started eating up a lot of the mechanic's time for about a month.
She finally gets around to transferring the title and registering the Infiniti, and he can't get it running. It seems like the car sat so long that the battery drained so low that the computer died, and some major component (a chip?) needed to be replaced. They bought two chips, one after another, but neither worked, so the car still isn't running. This is the LOANER, not even my son's car.
Meanwhile, my son's car has just been sitting there. They finally got around to tearing into the engine to see what parts it needed, and ordered those parts, but it took forever to get them.
They've had the parts for 2-3 weeks. They keep saying they'll have the car fixed soon, but every week, it's something else slowing things down. One of their other customers has had a newer BMW 6 series in one of their bays for at least 3 weeks. They couldn't fix it, but he refuses to let them send it to the dealership.
Now they're saying they'll give us a different loaner car, which we should have by the end of the week. She's supposed to have the registration updated tomorrow, and swears the car is running, and doesn't need any work done on it.
I know what you're thinking - they're stringing us along. We should have the car towed somewhere else to be fixed.
The thing is, I know from my friend the service manager at a local dealership that it has been crazy-hard to get some factory parts lately. If we have the car towed somewhere else, we're back to square one. We're already four months into this. I just want the damned car fixed.
I had a line on another used car I wanted to buy, from another guy I know, but he decided to keep it.
It's been really frustrating. I waited until the last minute to have my car in for inspection, oil change and brake job, because, A) it's hard enough for us to just have 2 cars for 3 drivers in the house, and B) I wasn't convinced they could get it in and out in one day. But, they did, so we were only down to 1 car for 1 day, yesterday.
Ordinarily, I'd be more skeptical, and not nearly as trusting of what they've been telling us, but we've been taking our cars there for over a year. It's a husband and wife team with kids, nice people, not rich people, who live locally, Coptic Christians who fled persecution in the Middle East. The other guy I was going to buy the other car from has been taking his cars there for years. I don't think they're BS'ing me. This feels more like small-biz blues than anything else.
One of my other friends is a business consultant to auto repair shops. He once told me that the typical neighborhood 2-bay garage with a single owner-operator barely breaks even as a business. I totally see it now. If I'd taken the car to the local VW dealership, we'd have had it back months ago, maybe, but it probably would have cost us double whatever this couple is going to charge us.