My incident began on 02/15 when I brought my 2006 Subaru outback to the Firestone auto care center on electric rd.in Roanoke VA. I brought my car in for a 30,000 miles maintenance service. Firestone flushed and refilled my coolant system, flushed and refilled my transmission fluid, removed and replaced my spark plugs, serviced my differential, changed and replaced my oil and oil filter, did a complete vehicle inspection, did a tune-up and removed and replaced my spark plug wires, and finally removed and replaced my oil pan gasket when they said they noticed an oil leak. My car was in perfect running order when I brought it to Firestone.
Firestone called me on 02/15 and told me some parts had not come in and could they keep the car one more day. I said yes and I picked up my car the next afternoon which was a Thursday. When I left Firestone and went about four miles down the road I noticed that the engine was making a knocking sound. I immediately turned around and drove back to Firestone. They said the would have to look at my car the next day to determine what was wrong and took me to get a rental car. The next day Brian Jones who was the store manager called and told me that my bearing end cap was bad and needed to be replaced. He said it would take him until Monday to get the part in and complete the work.
In the meantime I began talking to some knowledgeable friends who told me that Firestone might have dam
aged my engine. On Saturday I called a tow truck and had my car towed to our local Subaru dealership where I had purchase the car. The front seat of the Subaru was filled with two boxes of car parts from my engine. My car was broken and not drivable. Subaru said that my bearing end cap had been turned. I asked them what could have caused that. They said a turned bearing end cap could be caused by having to much or to little oil in the cars engine.
Initially Firestone said that they would pay to have a used engine put in my car if they could do the work instead of the Subaru dealership. I didn't like the idea of them touching my car again but, agreed to let them do the repair. The next day Brian Jones the store manager said that his district manager gave him two choices. One, file a claim and let Firestone decide if they had incurred any fault. If the claims departments findings were inconclusive or shown that Firestone was not at fault they would deny my claim and I would receive nothing. If Firestone decided that they were at fault then they would make some kind of arrangement to fix my car. Choice two was for me to give Firestone $2,500 dollars for the price of a used engine and they would do the repair work for free.
The initial maintenance work cost me $985.49 and my engine parts were in my front seat in a box. I could not drive my car. Now they wanted $2,500 more dollars to fix what I did not break. When I asked Brian Jones what I did to contribute to this he said. "Steve, I don't know what you did but we didn't do anything wrong either." I brought my car into Firestone's auto car shop working perfectly fine. From their perspective I guess the car was magically broken. Firestone does not stand behind their work. Firestone has lied to me when they said they would fix my car then said they would not. Firestone took my $985.49 for maintenance work and will not refund my money even though my car is not drivable with two boxes of engine parts in my front seat. Their business practices are deceptive. They are disreputable and won't do the right thing and fix my car which they broke.
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