Wellll....they got me:(

[Ah GetFd]

Rule 101. Give them a pristine inside and out car to service. If you look like you look after it so will they. If it looks like you don't give a Sh*t neither will they.

 

[LordKOTL]

Can I ask a question. Why not go to the dealership for an oil change? I get that Kia is not the highest in customer satisfaction but, if anything happens and you have a warranty issue, it would be no question.

I always wondered why people don't take their cars to the dealership for service if they are under warranty. I assume you are under 60k miles? Not judging, just trying to understand the reasoning by not going to the "best" choice for the oil change.

A lot of it is what @WRXtoStingerGT said: It's a crapshoot.

Plus, just because it's a dealership doesn't mean they will honor any damage that they do, won't do any damage to your car, and won't try to get out of warranty work if they possibly can. I'm sure it's been said here many times that dealerships often give the oil change jobs to the techs making the least amount of money to maximize their profit. You might get a good tech, but you might get a tech who forgets to put the drain plug in. In that case you might have a service writer who is as much of a scumbag as your average politician (the kind who got out of auto sales because they thought they weren't had-sell enough) who will try every trick in their gaslighting book to get you to believe that the dealership isn't culpable for their own mistakes.

True, sometimes you get a good dealership with good techs--cherish them. But if not they can be just as bad as any seedy shop--and more expensive to boot.

 

[Snicklefritz]

^^^ That's pretty cynical. I think the reverse is true. You might get a crappy dealership. If the majority of KIA dealerships were crap this forum would talk of little else but crap experiences. We get the bad stories, none of the good or satisfying ones.

My experience in over six years of reading these stories and taking my cars to the dealership is that nothing bad has happened. The worst I can say is that I got lied to about the sway bars being greased. I don't think that the service boss personally checked the work and just went by what a flunky tech said, which was a lie, or at least a cavil - that is, they grabbed the bars and the wheels and torqued on them by hand to observe if they could hear anything, and not hearing anything declared the bushings "fine and ready to go" - that's almost an exact quote, from memory. I was told this twice, months or a year apart. So, of course I figured the bushings must just be noisy, a fault in the design maybe. I put up with it for a few years then took my car to our "family mechanic" and he said that the bushings had never seen a drop of grease - and he made them silent for the first time. So, a flunky at KIA lied and I got lied to, twice, by the service boss. Yes, that made me cautious from then on. But welcome to the world of "a honeybunch of stinkweeds", aka the human race. Nowhere you go, nothing that you find in your quest, will let you escape that ever present danger of being screwed by someone who lies and covers their tracks. Just stay wary.

 

[LordKOTL]

^^^ I'm a lifelong cynic, what can I say.

I've never had a good dealership experience...well, except for the time I walked onto the lot and yelled, "WHO WANTS A COMISSION?!?!" at the top of my lungs, but that was not for repairs or maintenance.

Caution is always the watchword, and I am cognizant that others have had excellent experiences at dealerships; I'm not that glib. My post was just explaining why some people just don't go to the dealership for maintenance and oil changes; it's a crapshoot. Sometimes it's good, hell, I'd even say that it's likely most of the time it's good, but it can be bad as well; sometimes all it takes is a good tech to move onto greener pastures for a dealer to go from good for repair/maintenance to bad.

 

[Ah GetFd]

A lot of it is what @WRXtoStingerGT said: It's a crapshoot.

Plus, just because it's a dealership doesn't mean they will honor any damage that they do, won't do any damage to your car, and won't try to get out of warranty work if they possibly can. I'm sure it's been said here many times that dealerships often give the oil change jobs to the techs making the least amount of money to maximize their profit. You might get a good tech, but you might get a tech who forgets to put the drain plug in. In that case you might have a service writer who is as much of a scumbag as your average politician (the kind who got out of auto sales because they thought they weren't had-sell enough) who will try every trick in their gaslighting book to get you to believe that the dealership isn't culpable for their own mistakes.

True, sometimes you get a good dealership with good techs--cherish them. But if not they can be just as bad as any seedy shop--and more expensive to boot.

Just on one point.

Dealerships don't try and get out of warranty work. They get paid for warranty work by the factory.

But factories are very strict and will only pay the dealership when it is a genuine "manufacturing defect"

If the dealer thinks they won't get paid they won't do the work. They have guidelines down to the second how long it takes to change a water pump or a trim. They also have a data base of previous faults so they can see what they have problems with, say a hamonic balancer issue as my previous GM V8 did when multiple cars had the same issue and though not a recall issue they were fixed free of charge as cars came past the dealership. If you were after market servicing then you didn't get the fix....

If Kia consistently knocked back new car warranty then people wouldn't buy their cars new. In Australia it is a 7 year Unlimited km warranty and I expect that for 7 years.

I take the car for dealer servicing which I don't particularly like because of the price that I could do for $100.

The 10,000 km service cost $360, it took one hour and they changed the oil and oil filter under their "Capped Price Service Agreement" to all new car buyers, now I can only assume they put in the expensive Castrol 5W30, "A5" oil as specified at $100 for 6 litres and the $30 oil filter. The $15 fuel injector cleaner and the $10 oil flush. That means I paid $200 an hour labour.

But the agreement here between the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, a Federal government body is that a dealership cannot refuse warranty on a car not serviced at a dealership, BUT it must be serviced by a Licensed mechanic. That allows the aftermarket chains here to offer "log book servicing" that does not affect manufacturer's warranty. Now, I have serviced cars for 14 years with genuine parts and nothing is going to be stuffed up that I would go and claim warranty on, but I bought this car to not have to repair it in any way.

While I hate the service price, Kia cannot turn around and ever deny warranty for 7 years until the end of warranty, so the price I am paying for dealer service makes up for what I would save at home. The fact is I don't even do 10,000 kms in a year so a once a year service price is acceptable.