When a previous shop improvised instead of informing the customer, a routine clutch replacement became a costly lesson in standards and accountability.

You’ve surely seen the image going around online of a person getting a Pegasus tattooed on their back. There’s a glaring difference between the reference image and the actual tattoo. Underneath, the caption reads: “There will always be someone willing to do your job cheaper.”

When “good enough” leaves you stranded
We recently had to repair a vehicle that had been through exactly that. It was a 2008 Jeep Liberty, equipped with a manual transmission. It arrived on a tow truck with the owner complaining that the clutch had stopped working. To make matters worse, it had already been replaced once before, and very few kilometres had been driven since that repair.

Sure enough, it quickly became clear that the clutch was indeed not functioning. The pedal gave almost nothing away. At the very least, a clutch replacement was almost certainly in the cards.

This is where things went sideways: Once the transmission was removed, it became apparent that the previous repair had not been performed to industry standards. Worse still, the customer had never been informed of the decisions that were made during that job.
In a clutch kit, there is always a transmission pilot bearing. However, for the Liberty, a completely different bearing must be purchased separately. The previous shop decided to replace the bearing with an inappropriate part and weld it in place, as centred as possible! To be clear, there was very little precision involved in any of that.

The cost of doing it right
Many shops are accused of being too expensive or too rigid about the principles taught in training programs. That said, this example makes it easy to show those critics that doing things right in this situation would have come with real costs, including the vehicle sitting on a hoist while waiting for a part, other appointments having to be rescheduled, and so on. Even so, the job would have been done properly.

Being transparent and competent comes with costs that are reflected in the hourly rate, and in the price of repairs and maintenance at a shop. The moral of the story: Customers need to pay close attention when comparing prices, and shops need to be aware that their lack of transparency could very well come back to haunt them in the future, with a hefty bill attached.