Joe's New Blog

Nothing special, this is just my third effort at writing a blog about my life and what goes on in it: Hobbies, cooking, work, maybe the occasional book or DVD review, and so forth. Nothing really noteworthy, but this is sort of a little subset of my world...

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Why I shouldn't bother getting warranties...

Yesterday was again mostly cold and foggy. No real rain, but pretty much mist falling all day long. The morning was uneventful, as far as actual work went. I brought the car in for its oil change. While it was there anyway, I asked them to look at the brakes, which were squealing a little more than I thought they should, and at the shift indicator, which was sticking a bit. Since I have the VehicleOne warranty I bought with the car, I figured things like that would be covered. Well, I was told right up front that the brakes wouldn't be covered because those are consumable items, and to get rid of squeal and such would probably involve replacing the pads and rotors, at a cost of probably about a hundred bucks a wheel. That kind of sucked, but the service advisor told me he would have the tech at least inspect them and see how much life was left on the pads and such. I thanked him and wandered back to my cave to do the filing.

A while later, I got the call back that they had looked at the shift indicator to diagnose the problem, but that the warranty wouldn't pay for that, either. Turns out that the indicator is simply a "trim item." So, basically not knowing what gear your car is in is just a cosmetic issue. I told them to just leave it and I'd live with it, but then I was told that there usually was a diagnostic fee, but that he'd talk to the manager to see if we could waive it, since I'm an employee. Turns out that the charge to fix the damned thing would only be about $20 more than the diagnostic fee, so I told him to never mind and just go ahead and do it.

I got my car back around lunch time. About $140 down the tubes, including the oil change and such. Turns out the brakes probably have about 10,000 miles of life left in the pads, which is about 4 years at the rate I've been driving the beast since I bought it. The diagnosis of the shift indicator was that it was sticking because of a spill in the center console. I know I haven't spilled anything there, but I'm guessing it's just the accumulation of little crumbs and oil and general crap into the slots and such. I'm not exactly a very clean driver. I should really vacuum the little beast out one of these days.

Anyway, I guess the result of the whole thing is that next time, I'm probably just going to start a savings account whenever I get a new car and put the money that would go to the warranty payment into that account. That way, I can earn a tiny little bit of interest on it and have it sitting there waiting for when I need some repair done or something. And, in case of an absolute emergency, I can always take it out for something else. Live and learn, yet again...

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