I’m sorry Mr. Service Writer person; that dog won’t hunt. Even people who don’t understand how cars work aren’t going to buy it when the service writer says they have misused Mercedes, BMW and an assortment of other manufacturer’s wonderful machines, and that’s why the check engine light is on, the transmission won’t shift out of first and the air suspension causes the vehicle to look like it was designed to go around mountains counterclockwise—only.

The service writer or technician—less often the technician—wants the owner to believe that he or she is too stupid to understand how to use a car. Dealerships actually want consumers to believe their cars are fine, and if they only knew something about cars, there never would have been a problem in the first place.

It’s all about delay. The stall…baffle the consumer with distractions to hide the fact the consumer has bought a piece of crap and the good fellows down at the dealership hasn’t a clue how to fix it. The reason they can’t fix it is because something is wrong with the design.

Telling the consumer, “we’ve checked your car against similar models and they all do the same thing” is such horse dirt! If one of those boneheads told me something like that, good manners go out the window. I’m sorry folks, I’ll tolerate my share of idiocy but here the crap stops! I am going to give him and an ear full. For example, a well-known American convertible; when the top was up and the vehicle was moving at speed with the windows open, boomed and thundered inside the driver’s area like the drum section of the Los Angeles Symphony.

Quite rightly, the owner complained. She said it was driving her crazy. They had the brass to say that they had compared hers to several other vehicles of the same year and model and that they all made that noise. She would just have to live with it.

If I find a herd of zebras in my back yard that has somehow gotten loose from the visiting circus up the street and the circus folks point out that every other house on the block also has a herd of zebras in their backyard, eating their wife’s roses, and that I’ll just have to get used to it, someone’s zebras are dinner.

If you have experienced the dealership blame game, tell us about it. It may not cure them from doing it again, but sometimes it’s a good thing to get it said. By the way, we talk about this abuse and many others in Mr. Taylor’s book on Lemon Law The Standard Reference Guide.