By far the worst experience I’ve ever had at an auto shop over the 10+ years I’ve owned a vehicle. There are plenty of better shops to spend your money at in Regina. I went in to get my break sensors looked at with the forewarning that I was scheduled to go out of town in 5 days for vacation. Fast forward 2.5 weeks later and they finally fixed my vehicle, albeit after I had to cancel vacation plans, hotel reservations, ferry reservations, flights and all the sunk costs that come with that. They had initially diagnosed the problem after a day and then for the next 2 weeks would call back and find something else that needed to be done or encounter part availability issues. I would need 2 hands to count the amount of times I heard “bad luck” in place of actually holding themselves accountable for the job they did. I can understand issues of part availability being out of their hands but if they were more thorough and held themselves to the standard they claim to they would have done a more comprehensive inspection to avoid a situation exactly like this. And to cap it off after a terrible experience they offered no monetary discount pretty much implying that this was acceptable and meets their service standards. Spend your money elsewhere, folks! Edit to reply to the owner's response: I disagree completely that there wasn't more that you could have done, and instead you decide to put that responsibility solely on me. I was given a choice between a $2000 part or a $500 used part and given I was already at a $2500 bill, much higher than initially expected, I made the decision 99% of people would make. You could have offered to subsidize some of the cost of the new part to avoid further delay. You could have asked the salvage yard to send photos or followed up in some way to ensure the correct part was being shipped from the start. These are simple solutions that could have greatly improved the experience.
Matthew, when a contractor enters your home to do repairs, they don’t know what issues are hiding behind a wall until they remove it; this was the case with your vehicle. We had no way of knowing what the underlying cause of the ABS failure was until your axle was removed. Replacing a wheel bearing is very common; we do this at least once a week, however, we have never encountered a rear axle that would not separate from a wheel bearing. The fact that it broke a factory tool, thats sole purpose is to separate an axle from a bearing, is enough proof that this was a highly uncommon situation. The length of time that we had your vehicle was mostly due to your request to save money and install a used part; this put us at the mercy of a salvage yard that luckily had an FJ Cruiser on their lot, which was surprising, due to it being quite an uncommon vehicle. This salvage yard sent us the wrong part the first time, which is not uncommon, as they don’t have access to the same information that the parts stores and the manufacturers have. We are a highly respected shop in the city and ALWAYS hold ourselves accountable when we have made a mistake, however, in this case we did everything we could to get your vehicle back to you as quickly as possible. There is literally nothing more we could have done to get your vehicle to you any sooner. We understand that being without your vehicle was inconvenient and that you chose to cancel your plans instead of renting a vehicle, however, no one was at fault here, it was just a series of issues that were out of our control. For this reason, we do not believe a discount was in order, however, we didn’t charge you for the four hours that two of our technicians spent trying to save your original axle.
- Kinetic Auto Service