(WHAS11) Have you ever felt helpless in the waiting room at an auto shop? Unless you’re an expert, how do you know whether you should spend hundreds of dollars on repairs? This week’s Consumer Watch comes from a Southside Louisville woman who thinks she was taken advantage of and WHAS11’s Andy Treinen has her story.
“Parts were falling off my car; it felt like a little cartoon car,” explained Joanne Blackstock. The former JCPS bus driver said that was the straw that broke the camels back, after months of frustration with Complete Auto and Truck Sales on Dixie Highway; a neighborhood shop she first took her Kia Sedona to for wheel bearings on January 31. ”When I picked it up to drive it home, I had no brakes; well, I had enough to get stopped; but when I went in there, I had good brakes,” claims Blackstock.
Joanne showed WHAS11 paperwork that indicated she had both new brakes, and a new air conditioner compressor installed in 2010. She says Complete Auto also told her she needed to have that compressor replaced. She can’t help but think, now, that she was targeted because she’s a woman.
Joanne says her car was making an awful noise and vibrating badly, when she took it in she was told it was her air compressor. “I told them l said I just had my air compressor put on, in the same month I had the brakes put on last year and it’s only 6 months old, and they said ‘well, it’s back; you need a new one’.”
Two days after paying Complete Auto $408 dollars for that repair, the still prominent noise was diagnosed as a pulley problem. A pulley problem that Joanne says came to a head during the drive home from another $88 repair. “It just sounded like everything under my hood was falling to pieces, and I looked back and saw things coming out from under the car in my rearview mirror,” said Blackstock.
After Joanne says she was told it would be another $940 to fix her car, she told them she was coming to get it; she couldn’t drive it, so she had it towed. Blackstock showed us where many of those parts were left between her front and back seats. “It smelled like grease and antifreeze and just a combination of yuck,” said Joanne. Parts photographed in our story were found on the floor of her Kia, other parts were found under the hood of the van.
Joanne eventually took the car to the dealer and was told many of the parts had nothing to do with her problem. “I’m ready to pull my hair out, because I don’t understand why anybody would do that,” explained Blackstock.
When we contacted Complete Auto, they declined an on-camera interview, but pointed to positive customer reviews on yellowpages.com. An F-Rating with the Better Business Bureau was changed to a No-Rating on Tuesday, when the company responded to Joanne’s complaint.
Complete Auto also sent WHAS11 two charts explaining the difference between the two broken pulleys. They say the car was already apart, before she told them not to fix it. They say it doesn’t make sense that she would keep coming back if she thought they were cheating her. She says they broke it, so who else would she go to. In hindsight, Joanne says she has no doubt they were cheating her.
Blackstock would like to have her money back for the repairs after the initial job, but says her biggest motivation for writing Consumer Watch was that she doesn’t want to see this happen to someone else.
