BY DEVIN KELLEY
Pictured: Devin Kelley owns All Star Automotive in Columbia, Missouri. He is the MWACA Central Missouri Chapter Vice President.
WHAT DO A PUNCTURED OIL COOLER, the city police, the attorney general and the FBI all have in common?
They were all involved in a wild claim in my shop last year.
A customer had their car towed into the shop. The oil light had come on and it wasn’t running. We assessed it and learned that while they were driving, the cooling fan broke and had punctured the engine oil cooler. The engine stopped running, so the engine, both turbo chargers, fan assembly and other items were ruined. Essentially, we had a nonfunctional car on our hands.
Less functional was the customer; they were irritable, communicated poorly and decided to leave the car at the shop. After our initial assessment, we advised taking it to a dealership or different shop as we didn’t specialize in that type of vehicle (the estimate was over $38,000, far and away the largest we’ve written). They didn’t listen and even seemed to laugh at me at one point.
One week passed, kicking off storage fees as part of our process. They came to the shop, looked under the hood and accused us of stealing the fan and other parts, even though we had them inventoried nearby. They also claimed we stole the splash guard, which we had to remove to assess the engine. Another week went by and we told them they had to pick up up the vehicle. They came by, did the same thing, and as the situation escalated we called the police to report trespassing. They left before police arrived. Another week passed; another angry visit, and this time the police showed up in time and escorted them off the premises.
A few months later, we got a letter from an attorney that formally accused us of theft and wilful negligence. They demanded full restitution for the car even though the bad engine rendered it mostly scrap metal. We contacted our lawyer and sent the same day-after digital assessment we had shared with the customer as well as all other documentation. We wanted them to sign a release of liability as we hadn’t disassembled the car and certainly weren’t going to. We stored the car in a safer location offsite and several more months passed. Storage and attorney’s fees grew as more legal letters arrived.
Eventually a letter arrived from the state attorney general’s office with even wilder claims. They advised us to release the car or respond, and my attorney responded. I got my Federated insurance agent involved and they sent a third-party adjuster to assess the vehicle. His report matched ours completely, so now we have even more photos and evidence that we did not harm this vehicle.
We’ve now been dealing with this for over year. We learned their attorney dropped them as a client. They sent a check for the $120 assessment even though we’re over thirty times that in other fees.
My attorney advised us to release the vehicle and let them sue us; there’s literally no evidence of any of their claims. They finally towed the vehicle away after a six-hour fiasco involving the Columbia city police department, my Federated insurance rep, three additional witnesses and finally the FBI because they thought we had planted drugs in their vehicle. They even requested drug-sniffing dogs on site. I had to coordinate all parties and it was quite an event.
The moral of the story is that a sound assessment gives you leverage as you never know who is coming through your doors next. I tell my team to use precise, detailed notes similar to surgical procedure notes. I want to know every aspect of every repair, every tool used, when it was used, what data we collected, anything and everything to achieve maximum transparency.
Later, I learned the person had open cases against other dealerships in the area and was even suing a major state legal department over unrelated events. You just never know.