Ford dealerships

I took my car to a Ford dealership and quickly realized one reason Ford
is not doing well - they cheated me.

I only needed one lower ball joint replaced, which is what the mechanic,
service representative and I had been talking about, but they replaced
both.

The mechanic also wanted to do a wheel alignment, but did very little
except to make things worse, when it was not needed.

So I paid for 5 hours of labour when only 2 were necessary at a rate of
$105 per hour.

There was a Ford dealership in downtown Toronto. Although many
dealerships in downtown Tornto were moving further away from the core
because of condo construction, the downtown dealership was bought by the
owner of the dealership I went to.

The owner owned about a dozen dealership (not all Ford) and was into
real estate. The owner simple closed the downtown dealership, where a
condo will be built (by him I guess).

Now there is an absence of Ford in the middle of the city. The
dealership I went to was on the other side of the city.

This dealership also had a 2006 Ford GT parked inside for sale at a
price of $195,000. Perhaps his.

While Ford have not targeted their products well in the past few years,
I think having poor dealerships may be another reason for Ford's
decline.

I always found General Motors dealerships good. I had found many
Chrysler Motors dealership poor. But Ford Motors is not on top of their
dealerships the way General Motors is.

Ron

"rob" <me @_mine.orggg> wrote
> I'm heading to a Chrysler dealer over on the coast today and it should
> be fun. nice 69 HEMI road runner on their show room floor last year,
> but I watched the so -called most experienced mechanic perform a
> leakdown test on a car last year and he didn't bother to find out
> which stroke the cylinder was on, then got real ****ed when I asked
> nicely if that was the method he used to normally to do that test..
> that's when you find out just what a bunch of jerks work
> there..........all the way to top.

Yeah, that's the real problem. When I entered the service department of
the dealership (for the first time) I noticed the Service Rep. or
Advisor "Team Leader", and he did not look like a good guy who was
interested in people or the work performed.



> I'm betting they changed both of your ball joints because if one is
> bad, the other is usually worn out pretty well too but not always.
> Still if you wanted only one, they should have done only one or told
> you that they weren't comfortable doing that and gave you the option
> to take car elsewhere. A lot of shops ruse to do works sometimes
> unless they are allowed to change other common wear items at the same
> time in order to avoid liability and warranty issues.


Like others on this newsgroup my dad passed away. He had bought a 2001
Mercury Gran Marquis GS and put 21,000 kilometres on the car in the
first three years. He had a heart attack and lost his driver's licence
when he turned 80, but he kept the car.

So the car was sitting for nearly four years. The last oil change was
nearly four years ago and 120 kilometres had been put on the car since
then. In fact that may have been me when I was driving him somewhere.

I told the mechanic about this and he said when a car just sits the oil
in the ball joint can dry up, being sealed.

But just because one ball joint dried up, that does not mean the other
one did. Plus, we were only talking about one ball joint - the one
where the suspension was "creaking".

Then his wheel alignment was done poorly. He adjusted the toe-in by .05
even though it was within limits, but he did not adjust the camber even
though it was outside of the limits.

I arrived at the service department in the afternoon. This mechanic,
Tom, only had some tires to work on. After that he had time to work on
my car - starting at 2:00pm.

I think I know what he did. Doing one ball joint would take one hour.
But doing two ball joints were take two hours and doing the wheel
alignment would take one hour.

So Tom padded out his workload for the day - from 2:00pm to 5:00pm, when
he gets off work.

The reason I went to that dealership is because I had gone to another
Ford dealership but they were too busy to work on the car that day. So
I figured I would try another Ford dealership.

Lesson learned? I now know why the first Ford dealership was too busy
and why my second unfortunate choice was not busy with customers but was
busy adding extra work to customers.

But I wouldn't be surprised if this kind of practice at a dealership can
just snowball.

If a service department is experiencing a slow down in performance, the
owner could push the service department to do more to contribute to his
profits.

The service department could then begin to use poor practices, like
doing extra work the customer does not need.

The Advisor, Ivan, called in the mechanic, Tom, when I was there, and we
talked about the problem. But when the mechanic was talking about what
to do, the advisor really wasn't saying much as if he knew the mechanic
was planning on extra work and went along with it knowing that the owner
wants extra profit.

That practice drives away customers, which causes the owner to push the
service department even harder for more profit.

This owner is also into real estate. He bought the downtown dealership
and closed it. A condo is going up on that location.

The owner probably thought he could help save his dealership across town
by not relocating the downtown dealership, even though many downtown
dealership have recently relocated out of the core but still close
enough.

But now there is a big hole in the middle of Toronto where there are no
Ford dealerships - not even to sell Ford vehicles. Amazing!

So... is this Ford Motors' problem?

What does Ford Motors do now that they are the ONLY car company that
does not have a dealership in a large area of a large city in Canada?

What could Ford Motors have done to prevent this?

Ron