The Acoustic Vision LLC

The mother and daughter are return customers that have purchased a vehicle from us before and were very happy with itAs a courtesy to them being returned customers and wanting to meet their needs/budget- we sold them the vehicle on 05/26/with a very generous discount under AS IS condition
with no warrantyAs always, I told them that if they had any issues they could always bring it back and we could inspect it and go from thereIt is still a used car and it did have a fair amount of miles on it, so some maintenance down the road is to be expectedThe customer’s car, Chevy Equinox, was towed to my auto shop, Apex Auto Sales and Repair, with a complaint that it does not startUnder the hood inspection revealed: coolant and engine oil levels; pieces of dried mud on the top of the motor; internal engine noise when attempting to startWhen inspecting the car on a hoist, I saw that the whole bottom was covered by mud all the way up to the middle of radiator and upper part of the gas tankI took pictures and a video during the inspection (the video/pictures are available upon request)I called the customer to discuss what might have happenedThe mother said that the daughter was using the car and all she knew was that the car could not startThe mother was aggressive is wanting to find out why the car was not working but had not communicated with her daughter and was not told the full storyHer daughter had omitted to tell her where and when she had driven the car prior to the damageBased on my inspection, I suggested two possible reasons for why the car could not start: 1) engine exceeded limit for RPM, which could happen when a driver got stuck in the mud and pressed on the gas pedal too hard for too long; and 2) hydrolock occurred as a result of driving through a flood, where the water was above the level of the air intake or the car’s speed was excessive, creating a waveI explained that hydrolock could cause timing chain going out of place and damaging the engine or an internal damage to the engineI want to note that it is not always the case that hydrolock leads to the water getting into the engine oilAfter I had explained all this, the mother (***) spoke with her daughter and found out that her daughter and boyfriend were driving the car in a field thinking it was safe to do it because the car is an SUVAfter everyone was on the same page with what had happened , the mother acknowledged that it was her daughter’s fault and that she was not going to give her money to fix the carWe discussed the situation more and it was clear that the daughter could not pay either but needs the car to drive to workTo help them, I offered a solution - to take another car that I had on sale in exchange for their broken Chevy Equinox, under a condition that Chevy Equinox will be repaired for re-sellingWe did also give them a quote on how much it would cost them to fix the motor with us, and did offer our financing options should they need themThe customers decided not to do it and towed the car off my lot in a few daysThe car was on our parking lot for over a week during this whole process, we tried to help the customers by inspecting the vehicle and dedicating our time and resources to find a solutionWe never charged them for the parking at our place of business and most importantly our time and labor assigned to this situation

The car was not driven through a flood. It was drove on muddy fair grounds and the reason that my daughter said that it's an SUV-it should have been able to handle driving through the mud-just like all the other cars at the concert.  The reason that I was not going to pay to have the car fixed when he told me the price was because it would have been over 3000. to fix if I would have had him do it. He is the one who said that he would not fix it because he believes it was driven through a flood-not the case. When I spoke with him about the car I did not say it was my daughters fault-I was saying that is what he was suggesting. The car drove fine for a week after it was taken to the fair grounds. As far as not having a warranty-the car was less than 3 months purchased so basically it is a lemon car. I purchased a lemon from Apex auto. It was just easy to say he would not fix it because there was some mud underneath the car from driving it after a rain storm than to say that the motor couldn't have been bad with 155,000 miles on it. As far as saying he sold us the car with a generous discount-knocking $300 of the sticker price is not generous. It is within norm at any car sales place.  I guess I will