Friday, July 31, 2020

Bad Jeep

Friday: (07/31) A frustrating day. Lou gave me three items to accomplish for her today. One was to order her Redrose decaffeinated tea. We get it from Walmart because they carry it and it’s cheaper than anywhere else. They are out of stock. Failed. Order some 30” planter saucers. Couldn’t find any online. Faled. Get her Jeep looked at. The Start/Stop feature on the engine doesn’t work. It hasn’t for most of the time we’ve owned it. We’ve had it in for repair at least five times and they have fixed it twice on those visits. Once replacing the battery, the other replacing the “intelligent battery sensor”. It also returns to not working. The beeping and alarm messages annoy Lou, and me. So another try to get it fixed. This time it was at Sunnyvale Jeep. They looked at it a couple of weeks ago and found the second battery low and charged it and tested it and sent us off with no repair, a $124 bill for an item covered by our lifetime warranty and with the usual instructions it will take a day or two for the Intelligent Battery Sensor to allow it to actually start working again. Well two weeks and 330 miles and still not working so back we went. Same thing, They checked the battery, looked it over and found nothing. This time , at least, it was covered by our warranty so we only had to pay the $100 deductible. Of course it still didn’t work and had no hope of working. They said that to do more I’d have to remove all the accessories I installed because they must be draining the battery. The only accessory is the towing brake system and I have no intention of removing that. I feel like telling them they can remove the brake system and then if it still doesn’t work they can reinstall. I’d pay for the removal if it fixed the problem but I'll pay nothing, not even the deductible if it didn't and expect a refund. Of course that will never happen either. So, we have a Jeep with a Start Stop feature that supposedly improves gas mileage but never has worked well or often. That feature likely was considered when they published their city/highway mileage estimates which seems deceitful So our next action may be to contact the feds and the state consumer folks and see if we are the only ones affected. Checking online shows it seems to not work for anyone but most just want to disable it. What they want to disable mostly is the constant failure messages and alarms that can not be disabled and are not recorded as errors by the system. I actually like the feature, when it works. So, my first decision is how much do I want more frustration in my life or should I forget about it? It may be time to involve a TV consumer reporter. Another Fail. I called at 1000 in the morning, got an appointment for 1115, waited for word about it, rode my bike down to Sunnyvale to get it back about 1630. Pretty much a wasted day. Leftovers for dinner.

No comments:

Post a Comment