dodgy mechanics

[Syke]

today i found this lodged between the engine and the stone guard and i was quite pissed off about it. the fact i only bought this about 4 months ago, it has been through a service that included a front end inspection due to a rattle noise had me extremely fumed. Not quite sure if i can get anything out of this but thought it would be interesting for everyone to see.
it is an old broken fog light which i was unaware of being replaced upon purchasing from the dealer.

[aysean]

Report that dodge mofo to dem authorities. But seriously? That quality of workmanship...Go complain to management? or go report it to a newspaper. Boom. Wreck someone's business!

[Syke]

there is no evidence who what was responsible for the replacement, none that i have seen so far anyway

[The X]

I'm surprised they could not pick up on something so elementary as that. It's not like it was a smalll pin that you couldn't see. I wonder if they even bothered taking off the guard to have a look.
The mounts on that foglight looks pretty munted. Was the car involved in a front collision at some stage? Can't see how it could get that munted bouncing around on the plastic guard.
I get the feeling from a lot of dealer mechanics that we get a lot of lip service when you report problems and just ignore as being "just another n00b car owner" and report back with "didn't notice the problem".

Sean, I doubt any management is going to really care. Other than perhaps give a few sympathetic nods in your general direction to think that your concerns are being taken seriously, but that's it. You're not going to wreck anyone's business for such a small trivial issue like that.

[Syke]

very few cars get brought back to sale quality after a collision aswell. the previous owner has just hit something

[Dire]

In my 2500km inspection I complained about a rattle in my driver's door and they said they checked it out and couldn't find anything...
Pulled the trim off and immediately saw the speaker hadn't been correctly fitted from factory.
100% they didn't look. If your problem isn't mechanical (and therefore isn't likely to turn into a big problem for them later) then a lot of places probably don't care.

But your case is more dramatic. I'd be pissed

[aysean]

Isn't it some sort of issue with quality of service? I mean if your car's getting a front end inspection, they're obviously not doing it right? I mean come on;

So some dodgy mechanic basically just sits there for however many hours and just writes down that he's inspected it? I'm sure there's something you could do? Isn't there an ombudsman or something you can complain to? I wouldn't let this sort of thing go. But I believe in people doing their jobs correctly. Like, fair enough if it was something small, like a loose screw or something, but something that damned large, as if you want anyone else going to wherever you got it serviced and get the same kind of quality of service.

I don't know, I'm just sayin' it seems a bit, I guess unbelievable, to me at least.

[The X]

Well if you only took the car in for that specific purpose and you got charged labour, you could argue they didn't deliver the services that you paid for. so you could attack it from that angle.
However if you took it in as part of your scheduled servicing and mentioned it but they claimed to have a look but really didn't tack on any "labour hours" to the invoice for that particular bit of poking around, you might be hard pressed to argue a valid point, or one they'd give a crap about.