Dear Mr. Jeff Perry:
The intent of this letter is to express my complete dissatisfaction with your service department at your LaSalle/Peru dealership. We had been dealing with one of your salesmen at the beginning of the year when we were in the market for a Cadillac and in retrospect I can only be thankful that we found what we were looking for from another dealer.
The first instance of my displeasure was when I had brought my 1996 Chevrolet Cavalier in for service near the end of February of this year because of a malfunction in the anti-theft circuitry whereby the engine on occasion would die. After the scan of the onboard computer, the service manager told me that in order to fix the problem a thorough search would have to be performed and it would be costly. I appreciated the concern for the cost, this being a high millage vehicle so I asked him to disconnect the anti-theft circuitry but he informed me that too would be very costly because they would have to remove the dash and it would be highly impossible to do so because of all the interconnecting circuitry of the system. I paid my $52.10 and went home with my Cavalier.
When I got home, I did a search on Google for the anti-theft device on a 1996 Chevy Cavalier and lo and behold it appears this is somewhat of a common problem with this system and the search went on to tell me how to disconnect the anti-theft device. It took be about 15 minutes to accomplish this. So much for the dash removal and impossibility to disconnect the system.
On May 7, 2009 my daughter was driving her 2002 Monte Carlo here from Bloomington to meet us for a trip to Rochester, MN when her car started missing. We dropped her car off at Jeff Perry in Peru to have it repaired while we were on our trip. On Thursday May 7th she got a call from the garage telling her that she had a faulty sensor that had to be replaced which she told them to change. We picked up her car late afternoon that Saturday after she paid the bill which was $549.35. This would have been a happy ending for this story if in fact the car was fixed but the same problem plagued her once she returned to Bloomington and continued to be an intermittent problem reoccurring every other day or so.
The later part of June she drove her car to our house in McNabb and on her return trip her car started to miss again. She called our house and we met her where she was stalled not too many miles away. I let her take my truck home and I took her car to bring it over to the Jeff Perry dealership in Peru to see what they could do. After connecting the analyzer to the car they could not find anything wrong other than some malfunction with the transmission. The maintenance manager suggested that maybe this might be the problem and that we may have to have the transmission repaired.
I took the car back home and again went to the internet where I Googled the 3800 engine and in 24 nanoseconds I got my answer. The article instructed me to change the ignition coils if they were corroded. I didn’t have any coils to exchange so I squirted some electronic cleaner on the six ignition wires at the coils. This took every bit of a minute and a half. Problem solved. The car is running beautifully and to date has had no more problems.
Now I don’t care about the $52.10 I feel I wasted on my Cavalier as I certainly can afford these little mishaps life brings one from time to time, but my daughter can’t afford to waste $549.35 for work on her car that should not have been done in the first place. I feel very strongly she should be compensated for this unnecessary work. Hopefully we can resolve this problem without having to resort to a third party consul. I wait for your constructive response to this problem within the next ten days.
(In response I heard from their Service Manager who disavowed any wrong doing. )