A few weeks ago, an anonymous generous soul decided to liberate our Passat wagon of its driver’s-side rearview mirror. Apparently, its existence was superfluous, so much so that said generous soul neglected to even stop and offer an explanation, so generous was their course of action.
I took the wagon in to the VW dealership last friday in order to get an oil change and an estimate on replacing the mirror. Bob, the service manager at Cherry Hill Imports, graciously offered to give me an estimate ($220! For a mirror!) and then proceeded to tell me that the work couldn’t be completed in a single day (the paint takes two days to dry, apparently), so he would have the paint guys do the mirror up proper and then I would drop by on Monday to have it installed.
We’re not exactly rolling in the dough around these parts at this point, so $220 was a bit of a hard pill to swallow. My wife and I had a word when I got home and simply threw up our hands and a brief prayer to God. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much – it’s not that I don’t trust God to provide for us, it’s just that I guess I consider car repairs to be in the noise of daily life and something that, well, I should be responsible for. I bought the car (so my flawed thinking goes), thus I should be good and happy to take repsonsibility for anything that goes wrong with it. “Cattle of a thousand hills” (Psalm 50:10) only penetrates my psyche so far, I guess.
Monday rolled around and I put off dropping by the dealership in the morning, opting instead to go around lunch time. I pulled up to the service entrance just as Bob was getting up to leave for lunch, apparently. “All of my installation guys are out for lunch!” he said. “Tell you what, I’ll just install it myself and only charge you for the parts.”
The bill came to a little over $75, tax included – quite a bit off the $220 I was expecting. I sat down in the driver’s seat and offered up a prayer of thanks as soon as Bob ambled back off to grab his lunch, most likely unaware of the odd blessing he had bestowed upon me.
Providential Timing
Wow. You have spoken of a rare experience: Decent service at a VW Stealership…
Bob has been very deferential and helpful since i gave him a couple of “4’s” on a service evaluation. Apparently VW Corporate comes down hard, and I mean hard, on non-“5’s”.
So, I guess the secret is to be mildly harsh on an evaluation and send the service managers skittering. *grin*
Only $75? That’s amazing. I busted the driver’s side mirror on my Honda Accord a couple of years ago and the parts alone cost me $120-$150. The really annoying bit for me was the mirror is manual and only the glass and a single piece of plastic were broken, but they had to replace the entire unit because nobody sells just the 2 little parts I needed (mainly that chunk of broken plastic). *sigh* Dougy boy, you got a fantastic deal there.
Oh, and I’ve had decent (though not this good) service at our local VW dealership. So perhaps good service & VWs aren’t as incompatible as some Internet people would have you think.