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On the bright side, Apple's poor customer support has opened a niche in the market for local entrepreneurs.

• Scoundreller 5y ago
  Cars are the same. Stay away from the stealership! Resist their grease-less uniforms and bright signs!
  • taylodl 5y ago
    My brother-in-law is a Ford mechanic. When he has problems diagnosing something he has access to Ford's engineers. He can hook the car's computer up to Ford's network and the Ford engineers can run their "digital twin" in real time and see exactly what's going on. They diagnose the problem and my brother-in-law fixes it. Here's the thing - my brother-in-law has been a mechanic for 40 years. He was raised on the race track building race cars. His side hustle as a kid was to repair lawnmowers people threw away as "junk" and sell them. I say all this to point out the man knows his way around a car - yet in this day and age he finds he needs access to the engineers. You may want to think about that when thinking of the service department as the "stealership." That moniker is old and hasn't applied for the past 20 years.
    • doubled112 5y ago
      With that in mind, I've also heard some manufacturers have a problem solving flow chart when the vehicles come in. You plug it in, it gives you a diag plan, and you follow it. To venture away from this you need to ask permission. I can see why this would be beneficial most of the time. Nine times out of ten it probably saves time, money, effort, reworks, etc. It's that one in ten time where I feel this would fall short.
      • Scoundreller 5y ago
        > You plug it in, it gives you a diag plan, and you follow it. To venture away from this you need to ask permission. That was my German car stealership experience. Car suddenly sounds rough and reports cylinder 1 misfire. I swap around sparkies and coil packs, but still cyl 1 misfire. I write that up, go to dealership because this is beyond me and I figure they have fancier tools than my $20 reader. But for $250 they obviously didn’t read my note and advised replacing sparkies and coil packs even though I’ve 100% excluded those as the cause. And obviously if they had the tools to test a spark plug or coil back, they didn’t use them either. Their flowcharts not only lobotomize their techs, but have taken the place of basic troubleshooting techniques. Next indy read my notes and immediately does a compression test showing cyl 1 holds no pressure. Even sent pictures. Correct diagnosis was failed exhaust valve spring. $2k later and I’m back in order. I shudder to think the stealership could even tear down and rebuild their engine that way.
    • porknubbins 5y ago
      Having worked in the auto industry, dealers are independent businesses with varying levels of quality. My fathers newish F150 was having many electrical problems and a Ford dealership could not fix it (really they claimed nothing was wrong because maybe they caused the issue in another repair), so he eventually had to take it somewhere else and they swapped the body ecu. Dealerships are no silver bullet to fixing everything, it depends on the quality of the people who work there.