1 /5 Claire Coco: Just had a bad experience with the San Marcos Toyota Service department.
We dropped off my daughter’s car and asked for an oil change and check the brakes, the usual “checkup” you get when planning to go on a road trip.
They proceeded to send a video of a technician recommending a laundry list of items based on his “findings”. “The spark plugs are the original ones that came with the car, these must be changed immediately,” “all the fluids are black and need to be changed”. Etc etc. Then the service guy (a different person) checked the computer and discovered that we had completed almost all the “recommended services” including spark plugs at our last service, about 10K miles prior. (Most were “30k mile services”.) (I’ll skip the part about the breaks, unbelievable!)
The technician was clearly reading from a script, I suspect he recommends the same things to everyone, and the service guy agreed that was probably the case. In the video he made it sound dire! He recommended several thousand dollars of services (I looked at the old invoice and added it up). Needless to say, we picked up the car and fled the scene, oil change only.
And we still don’t know if the spark plugs are actually the originals. When I asked the service guy he said “I am sure they were changed.” But the technician said “original” on the video. It begs the question, did they actually change them at my last visit or not?
I will be asking the NEXT service shop that question.
You know, I usually go to the dealers for service and pay a premium to avoid getting jerked around!
I won’t be going back.