I finally got the Jetta registered on Monday, so I decided to bring it to somebody to try and get the flex pipe replaced. Unfortunately, that hasn’t happened yet because I brought it to these guys.
Now, Monro did some brake work for me on my Tahoe a month ago and it didn’t go great. It went in for a rear brake line, but another line broke when they were taking the first one off, and they blew out a third bleeding the system. I get it, that shit happens with brakes. But today is making me wonder if maaaaaaaaybe they just straight up screwed me.
I dropped the car off last night, talked to the guy and told him what I wanted: drop the downpipe, cut out the flexpipe, weld in a replacement. Thats what I want, and thats all that I want. I do not want anything else. Do that or do nothing.
They call me this morning and the guy tells me it needs a whole exhaust system, because the whole thing is rusted, and that’ll be $1475, by the way.
I laugh at him and say its a $500 car, all I want is the flexpipe replaced. He tells me they can’t do that (which is fine, by the way...if your policy is to not just replace flexpipes, I can live with that), but if they just replace the front section (downpipe, flexpipe, cat) it’ll be about $800.
And right here is my issue: the guy says to me after telling me the $800 figure that they don’t know if the back half of the system is even leaking/bad because the leak at the flex pipe is so large. Excuse me? So if you don’t know if the catback is bad, why was the first thing you did to try and sell me one?
Here’s the thing man, the catback might be bad! It could be crazy rotted, it could absolutely need replacement. But you can’t tell me I need it, quote me a price, then tell me you don’t actually know if I need that $675 worth of work because of how bad the front part of the exhaust is. You could have even said the front half would be x, but it might also need y and that’ll cost z if necessary. I’d have been totally cool with all of that. But I’m not at all cool with how it actually happened.
So I picked up the keys to the car and now I have to find somebody else who’ll just charge me $150 or so to drop the downpipe and weld in a new flexpipe. This shouldn’t be that god damn hard. I’m about two days away from ordering the flexpipe and going to Harbor Freight to buy myself a welder.