Originally Posted by
topflightpro
CDB and John, this has been helpful for me as someone who does not come from a car background to understand things a bit better, particularly in retrospect.
At this point, my wife and I take our cars to an independent repair shop. We had heard good reviews about them, but we were sold when the guy took a look at my wife's Prius and told her: yeah, the care is doing exactly what she said it was doing; he had seen that on a few other Priuses from the same year; Toyota knows about it but doesn't know how to fix it; sell it and buy a new car while it still has value, and then didn't charge her for his time.
It's great if you can find someone you trust. A lot of the bad things you hear about the auto service industry are true but there are good people out there, even at new car dealers. I worked at one dealer for 5 years and it was family owned. They watched things closely and if there was anything shady going on, people got fired. I thought that was how dealers were until I worked at another one which was like the Wild West. No management to speak of, no solid customer base, and tons of warranty fraud. Just stupid.