car repair way over the initial estimate

Hi all, this is my very first post here.

I brought my 98 TDi (bought privately two months beforehand) to a pretty respected main dealer with problems with my electic windows thinking it could be fixed reasonably quickly and without costing too much. This was on a wednesday and I half hoped it woould be ready by the weekend. They said they'd take a look at it and see what they could do. I rang the next day to enquire and was told over the phone that it would be ready after the weekend and would cost "over €500". I told them to proceed. During the week I rang a number of times to see if it was nearly ready. Most of the time I couldn't get through to the service dept and I was told they'd ring back. Most of the time they didn't. When I did get talking to the person dealing with it he said there were two or three leaks that needed to be found that were interfering with the electrics. There was no mention of the then current total. Eventually I was told that I could collect the car on Friday evening (which I had pushed for as I was going away and really needed it) and he said he hadn't the bill made up at that time. I made it in just before close of business Friday evening and was shocked when he totted up the final amount as being just shy of €2000! I expressed my surprise and dissatisfaction and he reduced it down to €1700. It must be said that €1400 of it was labour. I felt I had no choice at the time but to pay it with my credit card as I had to be somewhere later that night and I didn't really know what else to do.

My question is has anyone else had a similar experience and is there anything I can do about it? Needless to say I won't ever be going back there again but I was physically sick thinking about it since. The value of the car is about €4000 and to be charged such a sum for getting the windows fixed (as i thought) seemed very excessive.

Thanks,
Macing.

Paying not far off 50% of the value of the car for a window repair was crazy.

The garage should have kept you informed if it was going to be in excess of the €500 estimate (which sounds very high to me in any event).

The fact that you paid them ruins any chance you may have of redress probably.

Main dealer servicing will be prohibitively pricey for a €4000 car. A decent auto electrician could have done the same work much quicker and cheaper most likely.

1 question though - why did you buy a car with dodgy windows in the first place?

You're right it is crazy RS2K. The windows were ok when I got it. Thing is what would have happened if I refused to pay? Seems like I was over a barrel one way or another in that they had the car and they did do the work to 'fix' the problem. I did complain afterwards to the garage and they maintain that they couldn't give me a running total as they were working on it right up to an hour before i came to pick it up and the numbers couldn't be brought off the system until then. Even so, they could have given me some idea. 'Over €500' to €1700 is a huge disparity.

The problem was that they had to strip the interior twice to find the leaks. This seemingly is labour-intensive. Fair enough. As I said to the manager, supposing they had to strip it say five times to find the problem and the final amount came to say €4000. Would that mean I have to hand over that amount to get the car back? It's just that the communication was very poor from their side and if I had any idea this would happen I would have searched around for an independent auto-electrician or whatever.

Had you refused to pay you would not have got the car back.

TBH that's what you should have done.

You should have held firm and said "you estimated €500+, so here is €600 and that's all you are getting".

Also they shouldn't have needed to strip the interior twice. Once should have been enough if they were any good.

Anyhow all you can do now is learn the hard lesson, and perhaps ask a solicitor look at the case for you. I'm not sure that you'd get any redress however.

Hi

You could lodge a claim in the Small claims court and state that they were incompetent doing the repair. No garage should allow a repair to approach anything near half the value of the car(especially a non critical repair).

You could approach on two fronts

a) you didn't request them to fix any leaks and if water had damaged the wiring , they should have reported this seperately. This would have let you decide whether to get it fixed.

b)Extra labour was incurred because they were incompetent. Ie stripping out interior twice.

I would also contact the main dealers car franchise headoffice and report this.

Good luck