Scary stuff. Lesson: wash your own car, or ensure you know who you are dealing with if you have someone wash it for you.

Auto shop customer's complaint: shades of Ferris Bueller | Toronto Star

 

This is way too common. Glenmore Audi here in Calgary just got busted in the press for mechanics taking a customer car home for the weekend and putting 500kms on it, when it was supposed to be in for a nav system issue. Customer showed up at the dealership on the Saturday to grab something he'd forgotten in the car, and of course, it was nowhere to be found. The dealer staff just tried to say it's somewhere on the lot, don't worry, but the customer did worry, and when he finally said he was going to call the cops to report the car stolen - the dealership started phoning their mechanics. Which they obviously probably knew was the case in the first place. Several dealerships here in Calgary have been busted on this over the years, yet it keeps happening - high end ones, too, like MB, BMW, and in this case, Audi.

 

You forgot to mention that these dealers are able to do this due to the fact that they are able to reset that 500km without an issue. Last year a sent in a 2013 Grand Caravan for an airbag reset after the module had a premature failure. (Was not involved in accident) Car was being "repaired" for a week. Excuses like the SRS module was on back order to wires being damaged on the ecu was used. The thing that they screwed up was that the van came in with 11xxx on the odo but for some reason the cluster was reset to 10xxx which was actually LOWER than what the owner purchased the van with. Front bumper had some major chipping on the bumper and interior was complementary cleaned to try to defer from the points.

Luckily when I went for pick up, I noticed the bumper and the gas gauge was much more than what we left it with. Got that covered for free and they made that service tech who altered the mileage fix it in front of me.

 

I just came here to post this Windsor! *shakes fist*

 

I wondered why MOM smells like premix..

 

Lol this isn't even that big of a deal. It's not like buddy took the car out and wrecked it...just took it for a nice long rip and to do some errands maybe take it home for the weekend hahaha.
I wouldn't mind if there was no 407 bill and only a 100 or so kms.

 

^ what about 100km racing with the need for speed punks and grinding gears and dumping clutch? See, thats my problem. If I was sitting with the guy I'd be different. You just don't know how it was treated. I would be kind to it. Many people, though, not so much.

 

Are you kidding! If I leave you my car to clean it I expect ZERO additional miles on it!
There is no reason for you to use my car to run errands, or anything else for that matter.
On top of that if you read the article, the person in question doesn't have a valid license to drive let alone run a detail shop. . . . .
So yeah, not a chance I'd be ok with any of that.

 

Agreed. There is no reason for a detail shop to "test drive" my car.

 

Even mechanics shouldn't be doing trips of more than a few kms as a test drive to verify a repair - there is no circumstance in which they should be on 500 km "test drives".

If dealers are able to reset digital odo's, as sctRota wrote above, that is very disturbing as well. How can you possibly trust the mileage on a used car if it's easy to dial up the number you want? I thought these were supposed to be more tamper-proof than analog ones - replacing the cluster being the only way to get a new odo reading?

 

Resetting mileage is easy. There are a lot of people that do it. It's not tamper-proof at all, just makes the common folk feel better.

thewird

 

Anyone with standalones who must leave their vehicle at a shop (for say an alignment) should always make sure to set the rev limiter to 2,000 RPM and the boost cut to 90 KPA.

 

Just FYI, as of 2010, it's no longer possible to tamper with odometers on Mazda vehicles, even using the Mobile Mazda Diagnostic System (M-MDS) that dealers have. There used to be a function called Odometer Write, but it was eliminated a few years ago. In the event that an instrument cluster is replaced, the procedure is to record the current mileage on an official Mazda sticker onto the door sill and the new cluster starts fresh from zero.
Edit - unless there is an aftermarket OBDII module that can hack the CAN system that we aren't aware of... lol