If you are contemplating getting your vehicle - dubie.joshua
If you are contemplating getting your vehicle serviced here, drive as far away as possible. Unfortunately the service department here is either willfully negligent due to laziness or incompetent and in both scenarios they absolutely should not be tasked with touching anyone's cars.
I brought my 2024 Kia Seltos in believing I could trust the department to find what was wrong with my car. Starting about a month prior, my car started showing a code that said "CHECK AWD/4WD". At first it only appeared once in a while but eventually it would appear anytime the car accelerated from a stop. Once the car was turned off, the code would disappear again. I explained this to Josh LaPointe who unfortunately lacks the skill of listening to a customer. He turned my car on and immediately said, well there's no code here? We explained it again, and he said well if there's no code I can't scan it. My husband then took on Josh's job and drove my car around and got the code to appear. Unfortunately the scanner Josh grabbed didn't work and he said they would get back to us the next day.
The next day the Kia Connect app informed me that my car was turned on and was driven 0.62 miles. Fourteen minutes later I received a call from Josh. I knew before he even told me the issue that there was no way he had driven my car enough to get the code on and I was correct.
Instead of scanning the car, the service technician Alex just looked at my rear passenger tire and saw that it was a different brand. He decided in that moment it would be easier to just declare the issue of it being my tire and stopped all work. Josh explained first that my tire was the wrong size, when I pushed back on this he changed his tune and said it is the right size but the tread is completely different because of a different tread pattern. See, I had popped a tire at 3,000 miles and got it replaced at Firestone. Josh, and eventually his superior Derek, claimed that Firestone completely messed up my car with the replacement and I would need to spend $900 on four new tires. Yep, four new tires on a car with only 10,000 miles.
Yet when I questioned the tread measurement? "Uh well we didn't write it down."
When I questioned why they didn't at least scan it?
"We don't need to, we can see the issue."
When my husband called and questioned how their answer didn't make sense?
"You think you know more than a Kia certified technician?"
Turns out, we do know more. We knew we wanted a second opinion and at a minimum for the car to actually be scanned. We decided to take to car over to Firestone. When we explained what Josh, Alex, and Derek had said about the tread pattern and tread measurement the supervisor at Firestone laughed. He actually bent over laughing in disbelief. He went through and measured the tread and explained that even if I was driving a Subaru, company with the strictest tread measurement guidelines, my car would still be fine. He then scanned the car and found the actual issue.
The issue was never the tires. The scan showed that there was a technical service bulletin for Kias 2020-present. My rear differential needed to be replaced due to abnormal wear of motor brushes inside the actuator assembly. This would be covered under warranty.
Of course, Firestone is a tire company so we needed to take it elsewhere to be fixed. We ended up going to Kia Golling (where they laughed and said yeah the service department at Feldman knows nothing) where they confirmed the diagnosis. And again confirmed that the tire tread was fine and changing the tires would not fix the issue and the rear diff needs to be replaced.
The service department was rude. They were incompetent and refused to rectify their mistake. If you go here to get your car serviced you unfortunate very well may leave paying them money but with the issue still present.
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