Need your Nissan repaired? Stay away from Hall Nisson on Bonney Road!
At the end of October I took my car to them for service. I had been having some problems with a back tail light and one day the car didn't start. I left the car there and was told I needed a brake light switch and some rubber stopper for my clutch pedal switch at a cost of $289.69. It made sense to me. I had to take the fuse for the brake light in and out every time I turned the car on and off. They said the clutch problem was why the car wouldn't start. That model requires it to be pressed in to start the car.
Exactly one week later I came out of a store (again) and my car refused to turn over. I opened the hood and tried the usual things (plug wires in all the way, looked at the distributor cap - there was nothing I was able to affect so I called a tow truck again and had it towed to the dealership).
I can't say what happened inbetween week one and week two, but the service rep left me a voice mail stating they "could not" diagnose my car until I had $500 worth of tune-up work done. Keep in mind they didn't say they recommended it, they said they "could not diagnose."
While it may be a 1989 Sentra, any time someone tells you they "can't diagnose" something when they've got a computer to hook the car up to it's a clear indicator something fishy is going on. I called back but was never allowed to speak with my service rep - he was always mysteriously busy.
I tried to speak with the service manager. I was told he was "pre-occupied." They actually told me he was "pre-occupied." At that point it was really starting to feel like I was being discriminated against for being a woman. I can't imagine they actually thought I was going to roll over and let them get away with it.
I had to call the sales department to speak with the person in charge of the entire dealership. I relayed the story to him, at which point he said he would talk to the service rep and find out what was going on. He called me back later and very respectfully allowed me to get my car out of there without paying their over $100 diagnosis fee (which clearly they weren't due since they said they couldn't diagnose anything until they gave me a $500 tune-up).
After hanging up with the Sales Manager, the service rep had the gall to call me up and offer to do the tune-up without charging me labor - over $200 in parts. I can't imagine how they thought I was going to trust them to tell me the truth about ANYTHING after that debacle and how they thought someone driving a beat-up old Sentra could afford to just throw $500 around astounds me!
To Hall's credit, the Sales Manager was incredibly professional when faced with the situation. Also, one of their well-dressed employees did help a neighbor and I push the car off their lot as they maintained the rotor was the problem.
When we got the car off Hall property and were able to look at it (you can't be in your car's engine while it's on a dealership's property), we found they had stripped one of the screws on the distributor, cracking the plastic around it completely off and shearing off the head of the screw (and probably why they wanted to offer me free labor for the tune-up to cover up their ineptitude). We put a new rotor on and held the cap down, only to find that was not the solution to the problem.
Giving up, I called a tow truck to tow it to the only reputable car repair service I know of in Virginia Beach. I would have taken it there first, but I was concerned that the car wasn't starting due to something Hall did to the car the first time.
The good car repair shop called me an hour later to tell me the ONLY thing wrong with my car was a bad fuse. A BAD FUSE! Not only did they not charge me for the fuse or the diagnosis of the problem (some wonderful merciful people), but they drilled out the stripped broken screw from the distributor cap and put it all back correctly for a very minor fee. The tow cost more than the car repair.
This week I had the severe misfortune to lose my car to tidal flooding when the Noreaster blew through. It would have been nice to have a dealer to go to that I could trust to sell me a used car that wasn't a lemon, but now I have no car to get to work with and after reading the rip-off notices here about used car dealers I don't even want to look for one. I wish I knew where the forum was for GOOD car dealers.
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