AAMCO - Car held hostage. Pearl River New York

I’m pretty devastated… I took my car to this AAMCO & was met by a friendly receptionist & what appeared to be your average transmission shop (never been in one until now). I left the car there and was told I would have an estimate for work shortly. I received a call from the owner informing me that it would be $1200 to take the trans out & $2600 to fix it. This price fit in with my impression of a transmissions average cost so I gave a verbal OK. My first mistake.

About three days later I received a call from the owner again with “Great News.” I’ll paraphrase him here, “So your transmission’s a mess. To rebuild the whole thing will cost around $8000 since the transmission, transfer case, torque converter, & solenoids are all bad. However, I was able to find you a completely assembled trans with 32k miles for around $3800. So that, plus the labor, brings us to $5240.” $5240! Are you serious!! He wanted the OK from me within the hour since my car was, “Taking up space in his shop.” I hung up the phone and scrambled to make some calls. I spoke with two mechanics that both undercut him by $1000 and included 3-year warranties (his was a 90 warranty from his parts guy).

In the above paraphrase, I failed to mention that he wanted a down payment of $3,800 for the parts in CASH! Said he wouldn’t under any circumstances accept credit since he’s been “burned too many times.” I explained to him that I was afraid of getting burned too, so he assured me that this was simply to avoid paying AAMCO corporate a 10% fee. So he’s ripping off his own franchise (AAMCO are you reading this?). Now I’m asking for my car back…

He says, “Oh, you can’t do that, I’ll have to charge you for the tear down and the rebuild without fixing a thing! This’ll be like $3000 for nothing. Then you’ll take it to another guy and he’ll charge you the same price!” He then went into some heavy technical details on why my car was immovable due to its make and how the engine and trans balance the car (since I suggested we take it without him putting it back together).

Ultimately I caved and went with the deal since I couldn't figure out a way to get my car back. Hindsight is 20/20 though. I should have called AAMCO corporate and if that didn't work out, called the police or taken the guy to court.

Craziest part is, after I get the car back I'm experiencing some knocking when I make sharp turns. I immediately take the car back and he says it's the muffler jiggling around! He even puts the car up on the lift and shakes it back and forth. So I took the car to a local mechanic and he says it's the read differential fluid. After refilling the differential the car ran fine.

You need to stay away from these crooks, the father is a liar and a thief as far as I'm concerned. Everyone I talk to tells me I was taken on this job. A hard lesson to learn, but I'll never make this mistake twice.