
“Found out the dealership I took my Jeep to suddenly turned into con artists,” she begins. The homemaker, @fromscratchbyjax, normally shares recipes, reviews, and tips on her TikTok. Over the weekend, though, she took a stand against unnecessarily high car repair. The shop, Carl Burger Dodge Chrysler Jeep RAM World, wanted to “diagnose” an electrical issue that didn’t really exist. After just three days, the video racked up nearly half a million views.
She brought the Jeep in for an oil change and tail light bulb
The Californian, who drives what appears to be a Wrangler, took her car to a La Mesa dealership for basic service. She asked them if they had a tail light bulb in stock.
However, they told her if the turn signal was out, too – and it was – she had an electrical issue. They quoted her $241 to diagnose and fix the problem.
It didn’t seem right, so she declined the estimate and took the Jeep home
There, she unscrewed the tail light assembly with a regular ole screwdriver to detach it from the Jeep’s rear body.
Inside, she pulled the tail light socket out from the assembly. On her model, the turn signal IS is the tail light bulb. “Oh, look at that, it’s a burnt bulb,” she captioned the video. She ordered the $5 replacement part and installed it herself.
“Click! Good as new!
Of course, you’d hope that the dealership would have realized it just made an initial oversight and would have stopped at a bulb replacement charge once inside the assembly.
The comments – hundreds of them – mostly recount driver horror stories at shops quoting expensive repairs that either aren’t needed or are simply overpriced.
I have thoughts on this, being a woman in the industry. On the one hand, sometimes these cases are just straight wrong on the shop’s part. However, mechanics spend years learning their craft, and facilities have to turn a profit. Of course, it’s critical that a shop take care of its customers…truly, thoughtfully.
This goes for any industry. Last week, our furnace stopped working in below-freezing temps. A company came out and offered a fix, plus a device to help with my severe allergies. We’ve considered this type of HVAC mod before, and while they were in there, we went ahead and said okay to it. Well, it turns out they made something like a $600 profit on the job…for what took less than five minutes to install. We found the part on Amazon, to boot, so that stung.
Knowledge is power, folks, Jeep or anything else!