I've been to my share of good and bad shops before learning how to work on my car. One of the bad shops was one my buddy from high school used to work at for a bit. He wouldn't go too deep into the shady dealings that his boss did but they included things like charging for a new alternator when it wasn't necessary, yet all they would do is take out the existing one, polish it up a bit and simply reinstall it. I've also had a VW shop refuse to warranty their own work by claiming they "only install OE parts and never aftermarket," yet when we asked the mechanic that did the work on the car, he confirmed that he installed a non-OE part. The service manager still refused to honour the work. (Funny side story here... we ended up having a chat with both the owner of that shop AND a high up at VWoC and the service manager was promptly fired afterwards...) Which brings me to the good shops... The part that VW refused to warranty after installing it, we ended up having fixed by another shop (Mister Transmission) for free because the manager there was livid after hearing about the story from the VW dealership down the road from them. My brother also used to go to an independent shop in Langley that was honest to almost a fault. Until he started working at Mopac, he'd go there religiously because other shops in the area kept trying to screw him around.

But like people have already said, you should educate yourself to at least the point where you're able to make a good decision as to whether something needs to be replaced or not (ie: just because your motor oil is dark, it doesn't mean it needs to be flushed and changed). Yes, many people don't have tools, time or the know-how to fix their own car, but they should at least learn enough to determine if they're being greased.

It's not really that suprising, many of these guys are comission based. My buddy is a plumber and the more he racks up the bill the more money he makes. His bosses mantra is, "land the dig" which is exactly what it sounds like. Dig up pipes outside and charge huge money for doing. The whole thing is shady as fuck to me, I could never do a job where I thought I might be recommending work that probably doesn't need to be done just to improve my bottom line.

The way I see it, it's karma. If you screw others, it'll come back to bite you in the ass. If you're honest and do good work, if bad things happen, hey, it's just bad things happening and not because of shit you've done coming back to haunt you.

so why doesn't the APA or some other regulating body have the power to penalize the failed garages? what's the point of inspecting garages when they can carry on business as usual regardless of the results...

Some people have better things to do than to complain/haggle all day for money.

WTF does this have to do with girls?? Way to make a personal assumption base on a single post, makes you sound like an ignorant douche. It's funny how many times people would lose bets.