'Why do car makers make it so difficult to work on their cars that you purchase?'

Why do car makers make it so difficult to work on their cars that you purchase?

By Frustrated at 05/07/07 14:59

I purchased a car for my daughter a while back. I have had some good experience with used car dealers, but this experience was not so good. The first mistake I made was taking someone's word for something just because I know them. I bought a 1995 Audi A6, which was immaculate on the outside and inside. Mechanically, the only issue I first had was a noise that it was making on the passenger front wheel, which I thought was a bearing problem.

To make a long story short, it has had a few mechanical problems since that time. First the starter went awry and replacing that was a nightmare not even to be repeated. Then the car just died coming to a stop sign and we sat on the shoulder of the road for three hours waiting for AAA to send their roadside assistance, i.e., a dang tow truck.

The problem is the ignition switch. This should probably have been looked at when the starter burnt up because you had to manually return the key to the pre-start position or the starter would just keep engaging. Anyway the switch finally died. Never having worked on foreign cars before, I figured I ought to own a repair manual of my very own, or the library would get mad since I would perpetually have their copy!

Now that was an experience in web shopping! Try to find a repair manual for this Audi car. Now I am an older fellow, and owning a repair manual on CD just isn't my idea of a good thing. I want to have the damn thing OPEN in front of me when I am figuring out these diagrams and so forth...not have to run back in the house to look up each thing as I go!

The only book form of these I found was a three volume set that cost $250! There were some on-line manuals and CD manuals. I finally settled for a manual on CD that came a couple days later. I was pleased with the purchase and couldn't wait to try it out. I put the CD in the drive and it made me register the product and so forth. Some of this I find very irritating. I finally got it all installed and activated, and I still couldn't see any information!

I called the customer service department for the CD manufacturer and got a big fat runaround, since they weren't going to give me any information without me registering my product online. I had, of course activated the product that I hand in my hand, but that wasn't good enough. Finally after several attempts at registering, he finally put my name in the records and figured out I needed to talk to someone else.

The final person I talked to explained that I needed to go to the download center and download the missing information for the CD. Now why buy the damn CD if it doesn't have all the information on it that you bought? I tried to download their "reader" update, which of course didn't respond. I got frustrated and quit with it for the day. So now I have the handy CD here and an unresponsive download that refuses to get off my computer. Why can't the manufacturer of the auto just make a repair manual that you can buy. Why does everything have to be so difficult?

The only reason they won't allow you a fix-it-yourself manual is because they just want you to come to them so they get the money that you have to spend. The only alternative is to be car savy, but it's only so easy to just because car smart... especially that the car is an "Audi" and that means that all the parts you german engineering instead of american so it is even more mind boggling. Having said this, they force you to buy from them and them only and at a price costing you an arm and a leg. Seems there is not a way around this unfortunatly unless you buy the parts from them :(

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