I once spent ten years as both a Claims Adjuster and Claims Analyst for what was then one of the largest aftermarket service contract providers in the country. I'm now helping to liquidate the company.
What brought it down? Pure greed on the part of dealers and repair shops. Every dealer and scam artist in the country thought they were going to get rich at our expense. And the large, franchise new car dealers were by far the worst of the lot. They knew the manufacturer would never get down on them because they moved too many vehicles.
I could write a book on the experience, and I may sometime. I caught a Chevy dealer in Mississippi installing a used engine in a pickup after I'd authorized $2700 for a new Goodwrench engine. I caught a Dodge dealer in Texas wanting $3900 to replace the engine in a full sized Dodge van when the only problem was a $200 injector. I caught a Dodge dealer in Colorado installing a 90 day salvage yard transmission in a Dodge Intrepid after I'd authorized $1700 plus labor to install a Chrysler reman unit with a 3 year, 36,000 mile warranty. And this was all in the same day. We Adjusters, and there were 60 in the company at one time, used to talk among ourselves that considering what the dealerships and repair shops tried to do to us, knowing we were professionals, it was mind-boggling what they must be doing to an uninformed and unsuspecting public.
One Adjuster of ours once took a claim call on a transmission failure on a particular vehicle. The shop said the car was on a hoist with the trans removed and disassembled. Our Adjuster called the owner of the car and said he'd like to ask a few questions about his transmission failure.
The owner replied, "What transmission failure? I drove the car to work this morning and it's parked outside my office right now". The whole thing was a flat out scam. The shop had a slow day so they pulled a contract at random and called in a transmission claim.
I once took a call on lifter noise in a Dodge Caravan. I noticed the van had only been sold a month before, so I called the owner and asked if he had heard any noise when he test drove it before he bought it. He said he couldn't tell, the salesman kept the radio turned up too loud. (Smart salesman).
We finally had to put a clause in our contracts that the total of all claims on a vehicle could not exceed the then NADA wholesale value of the vehicle prior to the most recent failure. Otherwise dealers would try to rebuild all the junk on their back row at our expense. They'd sell a junker for $2000 and run up twice that in claims within the first couple of months.
I'm out of time at the moment, but I'm convinced that everything negative and derogatory that has ever been said about the automotive business has been grossly understated. There are some real slimeballs out there. And that includes most of them And the only way it's going to straighten out is if the public educates themselves enough to refuse to put up with it. And that's not likely to happen.
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Today's Featured Article - Listening to Your Tractor - by Curtis Von Fange. Years ago there was a TV show about a talking car. Unless you are from another planet, physically or otherwise, I don’t think our internal combustion buddies will talk and tell us their problems. But, on the other hand, there is a secret language that our mechanical companions readily do speak. It is an interesting form of communication that involves all the senses of the listener. In this series we are going to investigate and learn the basic rudimentary skills of understanding this lingo.
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