(Liz Klimas) -- The YouTube user William Clark, a South Carolina man who owns a 2010 Chevy Camaro, asks if you have “ever felt cheated, lied to, put upon, and taken advantage of” at a car dealership or auto repair shop? He felt he had been burned by a dealer making repairs on his car in the past, but had no proof.
The last time he had to take his sports car into the shop though, he installed a recording device. And while you may think this paranoid, even with his previous history of feeling cheated, after listening to the audio, you’ll find he was completely justified.
Clark explains that he brought his Camaro to the Best Chevrolet-Kia in Easley, S.C., after he began to hear gears of the vehicle grinding at parking lot speeds and up to 35 miles per hour.
The audio he recorded during the time the vehicle was out of his hand reveals not only that his car was taken for a joyride by service center workers, but also that they had devised a scheme of how they would charge him and General Motors for the clutch they themselves had damaged.
He writes:
I made it clear what the symptoms were. Yet the Service Manager and his crew took the car for a twenty minute, tire squealing, drive it like you stole it, all out thrashing. They Launched the car over and over again. They did high speed low gear decelereactions.
Clark said the level to which they drove the car was harder in 20 minutes than he had driven it in his years of ownership.
Listen to what he recorded, which he distilled to less than five minutes of audio (Warning: Some strong language):
Clark says he took the evidence to the dealer’s fixed operations director, who didn’t acknowledge wrongdoing, but said he would take a look at the car, potentially make the repairs for free and suggested a possible trade in.
“He is trying to sell me a car because mine is DAMAGED now!!” Clark wrote. “They burned the clutch up, then tried to sell me a clutch, and then two days later bill GM for the same work. Then the Fixed Operations Director tried to sell me a car and convince me that HIS mechanics actions were acceptable trouble shooting practice. He had ample opportunity to do the honorable, decent thing.”
