We recently purchased a used Audi from a friend. When we purchased it, the previous owner let us know that there was a recall on the airbags and it would need to be serviced at a dealership. Needing to find somewhere to get it serviced, we went to our closest dealer, Audi Bellevue. We had no issues with the recall service, so we figured that we would give them a shot for routine maintenance. This was a mistake. We called the service department to make an appointment, and a call center took our appointment request. Over the phone, they quoted anywhere from 200-1000$ for the service at our stated milage (around 102,000) and for a check engine light. When we took the car in for its appointment, it turns out they had completely misquoted us over the phone, telling us the price for a 95,000 mile service instead of the 105,000 that they thought we needed. The price would be 3,600$, and end up including the replacement of the timing belt and water pump asl well, instead of the initial 200-1,000$. This seemed ludicrous to me, so we called a few other shops for quotes and it turns out I was right. All other quotes were around the 2000$ for the exact same service. I called to cancel the appointment, at which point the service advisor dropped the cost of the service to 2,400 (a 1,200$ difference) over the phone. While I appreciate the effort in price matching, this makes me wonder why we were quoted 3,600$ in the first place. What were they overcharging for? Due to the drastic change in price though, we kept the car with them. Turns out this was a big mistake. After some time, we get a call stating that the car needs a new fuel pump. This would add another 1,100 to the service (other shops quoted at around 800 for the same thing). We declined this service, as we were already feeling uneasy about their pricing. We were told that the car would be available that day for pick up, as long as we arrived before 8:00pm. We drove to the dealer, arriving at 7:15p, only to find that they had closed the service shop without setting aside our keys for pick up and made no arrangements for us to pay even though the service advisor explicitly stated we could get the car before 8:00pm. We ended up having to leave without our car and come back the next day. We finally picked up the car, and took it instead to Redmond European (who have been nothing but amazing throughout this entire process). When we took it in, the technician noticed some discrepancies on the repair report. They did not run a code check on the car according to their notes, the only reason that they noted that the fuel pump needed to be replaced was due to a slow start up. Our new technician let us know that it is extremely strange that they would not run a diagnostic first thing to let us know that there may be other issues with the car, instead letting us get deep into the repair cycle before consulting us on what we would like to do. The Redmond European technician also let us know about an extremely common failure point on our model: specifically a cam shaft tappet on one of the fuel pumps. He let us know that we should check that before sinking any more money into the car, because there was a chance that this could cause irreparable damage to the car. Lo and behold, this was the issue with the fuel pumps. If the Audi Bellevue dealer had done their due diligence and checked the codes first (which is one of the primary reasons the car was brought in for service), they would have found that the pumps were working much harder than they needed too due to this failure, and could have given us the chance to make very different decisions about the path we chose to maintain the car. We called their service department managers, and they seemed fairly indifferent to our problem. We were not offered any form of a fix for our experience, stating that since we already received a discount for the initial service. I will never come here again.
Disgruntled Customer
Apr 26, 2019
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