At your service

I am done with the Stealerships.

If you're any kind of regular reader of this blog you know I've not had much luck with dealership service departments. Last summer, my daughter's Volvo broke down in Las Vegas and the local dealership tried to clip me for $312 for a new battery. The same battery sells for $118 at Pep Boys.

More recently, Beverly Hills Lexus tried to make off with a hundred of my hard earned copywriting dollars to replace a gas cap. A $100 GAS CAP!

For a hundred bucks that gas cap ought to climb out of its hole every night and robotically wash the car like some automotive Roomba.

I probably shouldn't have been visiting these places in the first place. But I'm a sucker for faux luxury environments. I'm easily seduced by their bright lights, their clean floors, their leather club chairs and their pandering service, "Can I get you a newspaper and a latte, Mr. Siegel?"

These upscale service departments are a far cry from the garages of my youth. Dirty, ramshackle, open air huts strung out along the length of Route 59 that cut a swath through Rockland County. They've all been converted into jerry-rigged yeshivas, that are now, impossibly, even dirtier and even grimier.

All that is in the past.

Because I discovered Larsen Automotive which is less than a mile from my house. There, I met Nick Larsen, who had been operating the shop at the corner of Overland and Jefferson for quite some time. Much to my dismay, I had simply never noticed it. Which is not all that shocking considering it was only last week that I discovered my wife doesn't like onions.

Life has a way of hiding in plain sight.

To say I'm overjoyed would be an understatement. Work that the Beverly Hills stealership wanted to do would have cost me close to $4000. Nick and his crew did the job for a third of that, including a cleanup of the Mass Air Flow Sensor, which had been causing erratic acceleration.

Now, the 2007 Lexus LS 460 is running at, or near, factory release standards. Had this been the case a year earlier, I probably would have averted my second mid life crisis, not bought the Audi S5 and dumped the lethargic Lexus on my unsuspecting wife.

Over and above all that, when I bring the car in to see Nick, I see Nick. He has his name on the business and so he goes out of his way to greet each customer. He's candid. He's friendly. And more than willing to explain what he did and what he didn't do.

In other words, he does business the way I do business.

So I don't get the "free" loaner car. I don't get the latte. And I don't get the faux sycophancy that passes for service in Beverly Hills.

And I don't miss it one bit.