Expensive & terrifying mistake
We were pleased to see the good reviews for this shop, so we purchased a small suv with nice new tires there. My niece & co-signer said explicitly that she drives for work and it had to hold up to a lot of highway mileage.
Long story short: there were problems with shaking, squeaking, and alignment that showed up quickly. We went back often only to have our driving insulted and our senses questioned. He kept sending us to his mechanic, who showed us a printed pre-sale repair order which noted "welded cv axle"... and no kidding, because it had been welded so that the tire was fixed at about 13% out of alignment.
Interestingly, when I tried to get a copy of that order later, it turned into a handwritten bill with no mention of the CV axle.
By the time we demanded that the seller buy it back, he agreed to have his mechanic take one more look at it. We had it pre-inspected before taking it over.
That inspection, where the suspension was partially disassembled, showed not only that the CV weld had popped off, but that the *entire subframe*, all the way from the entire rear up to a few inches on one front side, had rusted all the way through and cracked away from the frame. This was hidden by the structure until you disassembled it - for instance, to weld a CV axle improperly.
This means that the whole wheelbase was ready to fall off the car and send the cab spinning through traffic, with my girls inside.
This unsafe, unrepairable, and unconscionably bad car was sold to us knowingly, and the seller and mechanic colluded in deceiving us and making it impossible to proceed.
The dealer should buy back the car. The set of tires it required at 13 weeks, extra work, and multiple alignments to manage the symptoms should probably be factored into that cost, because what we were sold was billed as a turn-key vehicle and what we got was a costly, and ultimately terrifying, disaster.
It's still only about $11,000, and - as he said to me in one of our conversations - he could write that check today.
That would be fine.