Not at all impressed with (UN) IMPRESSIVE AUTO

A few of you know I've taken a couple of my cars to Impressive. But I'm not going to start talking about how great they have been for me because this is not my thread, I did that already on my own behalf.

I think its completely fair for people to write about their bad experience, as much as the good ones. As enthusiasts, or at the very least just fellow forum members, I think its great for the community. We buy or don't buy products and services based off of other people's experiences. I don't have a problem with Lennon posting his experience. I remember seeing him there once, and I remember seeing his car there for some time. Great looking car. At the end of the day, its pretty obvious no one wins in these kinds of situations. OP, I hope you do get your car back on the road soon. You seem like someone who takes car of their car and puts the effort to do so.

I can't judge the situation because I wasn't a part of it. The only thing I will say that doesn't seem very fair is that you show a picture of the wheel that you were reimbursed for to have fixed on your own, and show a picture of the damage to your bumper which was later refinished and fixed. So I just don't understand why play both sides.

Every single shop will have its good and bad reviews. OP I hope you get your car back to how you want it and finally get to enjoy it. Best of luck.

If the timing chain guide broke shortly after a rebuild, and it's common on high mileage bmws, then that should have been part of the recipe upon which your costs should have been based...whether it's a $30 part or a $70 part...you're right there anyway.

If OP paid for that because it wasn't your fault it broke, I don't think that's entirely true or fair. You have plausible deniability, no doubt, but if a crank cracks, that's a significant thing. Knowing the engine had been tortured thusly, I know if it was your own car, you'd replace every under $100 part in the neighborhood. I know I would if the getting to them was that tough. I know the chain guide probably only took a day to do, but don't charge the guy. You were right there...it would have looked exactly like you expected it to look for a high mileage M. They show signs of wear...I've seen quite a few of them.

Anyway, John, you did very well in acquitting yourself here, I thought, not that you care, but that one thing, for me...that you were focused on the major repair in front of you, admittedly with a tough and educated customer as our OP...eager to get his car out of your shop and on the road, and missed ancillary things that were showing signs of age. I'm not directing that at you as personally as it sounds, as I know your mechanic did the work, but it sounds like you know the car well, so if you hadn't of poked your head in to see what's up, you should have, and if you did, and noticed the worn guides, you should have at least given the OP the option of replacing them for another (insert bargain price here) or not. The guy's car had been in your shop a long time, out of good will, you could have offered him the benefit of savings while you were right there anyway--he had the option to say, "no thanks, I don't want to spend another penny beyond what we agreed" or "thanks for giving me the option, sure, go ahead and replace the guides...anything else you'd recommend?"

Anyway, I also wanted to say that I do think the OP got more upset than necessary over the wheels and bumper...stuff happens!

Anyway, that's what I think from the bleachers, and I wouldn't have said another word if you hadn't of been so forthcoming about wanting feedback on how to improve.

Just those two things:

More oversight

Offer large rebate to OP for your failure to educate him about well known issues that could be fixed inexpensively while you were doing the crank...and, because it took so long.

I don't know how belligerent OP got during your special time together and believe me, I know how pissed that can make someone, but I'm also sure you have ways of ameliorating things...and then, when the coast is clear, get as far away from him as you can!

haha screw Indy shops , nothing but headaches

Originally Posted by ///Mostarac

I think OP has every right to post his experience. The excruciatingly long original post shows that he was trying to be as unbiased as possible as he described every situation in great detail. Having gone through all that crap and spending so much money with a final outcome that got him nowhere is very irritating. I agree with the above posts on how OP should have been notified about his car being scuffed up, thats something that should be immediately brought up to ones attention. The fact that he pointed out that John was very hostile over the phone is very unprofessional. Thats something I will always avoid when choosing shops. Good luck with the car OP, you don't deserve this bs.

From my experience, John wasn't exactly the type of person I would want to deal with on the phone with tough guy attitude and talk big. Like OP, I was the one calling regarding the status all the time but I am glad my car turned out just to be ok, not exceptional for the price.

Thousands of dollars and 5 months, car still in the shop is unacceptable service. For my level of work, I can direct craft labors to build a new powerplant in 5 months hence this is just a car. Unfortunately, impressive got alot of fanboy who received free oil change or something insignificant so they will be there as always back them up even when other customers sharing bad experiences with the shop.

I will take the time to respond to all of the lemmings coming out of the wood works telling me I don't know what i am talking about or to be grateful (yes i am grateful i spent THOUSANDS to not have the job completed correctly, idiot.)

However, before dealing with those fanboy peanuts I would solely like to address John's two defensive posts....

Originally Posted by John@ImpressiveAutoCenter

We are very sorry to hear that you were not satisfied with any of the work which was provided to you. I realize you spent a lot of time writing this thread but it is not completely accurate, and extremely over dramatized.
1) You initial complaint was that we did not update you at all during the long wait for your crank shaft. This is not true since I personally put you and the dealership on a three way conversation over the phone and they explained to you that the part is delayed and i asked them to provide you a tracking number which they did for your part so you could be up to date on its status.

You failed to call me back multiple times when you said you would, never apologized for it and offered excuses. As I said your customer service has left something to be desired.

2)You claim we damaged your wheels at the shop, there is not proof that this ever happened nor was the car ever near a curb that this could have happened but since you were doing so much work to your car at our shop and your car was in very good shape we offered to pay for its repairs, as a professional curtesy. Saying the wheels looked like Garbage its a huge dramatization as the damage was not extensive nor our fault.

My wheels prior to IMPRESSIVE having my car were perfect, i verified this with my personal mechanics after the car was towed from them to you. Again I invite anybody to take a stroll past this shop on any given day during the week. Every car is up against the curb on both sides of the street. Decide for yourself.And jon, you damaged two wheels, both of which you said you would fix, you fixed one i believe and you didn't even tell me about the other one, one of your guys told me I would be getting a refund for the other wheel and that they put some touch up paint on it. That was never part of the deal as I told you it was 125 per wheel to be fixed and you begged me to let your guys try to do it first even though I was reluctant to agree and you knew this. I also then said thats wonderful about the refund but does that cover the time, effort, and distance I now have to travel to fix your mistake? No it doesn't, and you said I will send them wherever you want, and what else you want vinny? A new car? This is laughable and far from even par customer service.

3) You claim that we were trying to cover our tracks by firing a previous mechanic that rebuilt your engine and hired a new mechanic to fix his problems. There is literally no truth behind this, our head mechanic took his annual vacation which he takes every year to spend time with his family that lives outside the country and we hired a BMW tech to take his place for the time being.

Yes so I heard, however, your own house Jon talks to me and gives me the actual scoop, including ruining one of your own employees cars. I did say I was dissatisfied with IMPRESSIVE overall and the way jon speaks to me and handled these situations but I did not say everybody there is like this. I met (2) real good people at his shop, guys I trusted more so than Jon.

4)You had a complaint that we damaged your rear bumper, yes this was an unfortunate incident i do not know when this happened but we extended our apologize and fixed everything with no charge to you, You started saying that you did not get to inspect that paint job well that day due to the rain, its has been several weeks and there has been no complaint from you about the paint quality so i see no reason to question our painting.

You fixed it no charge? Should I be pleased? you know this happened in your possession Jon, don't play games. You weren't even at your shop when I picked up the car and you had no idea what had even happened.

5) You had so many complaints as to you constantly traveling to come pick up and drop off your car, you failed to mention that several times you did not come during business hours, since we close at 5:30pm every day and we waited till after 7:00pm several times just so that you could pick your car up. Besides those incidents we usually went out of our way to make due for any special requests that you had for us which we always honored, although every time you always asked for another request, and always every time it was free of charge, such as free clock springs, the gumbo was for free, smoke test was for free, dye test was free, vanos gasket free, valve cover gasket was free, and several other free parts.


Jon as i explained to you prior, i do not work in a world of 8-5, my hours are from 6.30am until about 6.30-7pm in the evening, I was not your typical customer and I made this explicitly clear to you before we even began business.
6) You also failed to mention that your car was originally brought to us from another shop, a shop which did not want to work on your car any longer due to your demanding attitude and never being satisfied with any work due to blaming all issues with your car on mechanics working on it.

This is NOT true, you don't know my shop, my guys, this is pure speculation, they built me an 800whp porsche turbo, you think this is something out of there reach? master mechanics for MB USA in the late 80's, beyond qualified pal. And I still bring all my other vehicles there and even have one of my mercedes there right now! So your argument here is based on your speculation and is totally wrong...but nice try to turn this onto them and me as a customer. Infact, they will have the car this week and will find the issue of the oil leak, give me an extensive write up (something I asked you to do several times which you never once did) that will be submitted with the rest of the paper for the claim

7) The link you provided about charging for credit cards contradicted your own question. We do offer a discount for customers paying with cash, we also do not usually except credit cards, and at the bottom of that page you attached a link to it stated that a business is allowed to charge a fee if they do not make credit card payments a regular part of their business. We did speak with your credit card company and they told us you have no substance to your claim since we did work on your car and the issues which we were payed to fix we did.

Issues are not fixed, the car is still leaking this morning, I just returned to LI and pulled it out of the garage, ill post the pics of oil that was not there on thursday evening when I pulled it into my garage. Since I paid for a job, the job is not completely successfully finished, i am still having issues so how do you figure you completed the entire thing successfully? half assed jobs are not complete jobs in ANY LINE OF WORK


8) We usually consider that customers are always right and you always had complaints that you wanted us to fix as well such as she you had an error code for lighting which you stressed was a big issue we needed to fix which was just a bulb that was out.

My car had no lights out before you had it, this is the same for the clock spring and these parts just magically broke while in your possession, NOT MINE.

Your entire post was just slander towards our business and had little truth to it and the truth that was there was Extremely unappreciative of all the trim and work we put into your car and over dramatization of any issues. We still had someone speak with you today and offered to work with you in anyway you wanted to, even if you were not satisfied with our shops work we offered to give you pointers on what to tell the next shop you wanted to take your car to, but you did not want anything from us. You claim there is so many unsatisfied customers from our shop this is not true, we have worked with hundreds of people and rarely get complaints and not to the quality of our work, if anything it would be for time constraints as we are usually very busy because people trust us with their cars, because they know we will take car of them. If you are interested in taking care of anything with us we are always willing to help.

Yes some other guy who I have never spoken to or met before, i swear its a different guy every time and I asked him to call you ASAP and have you back to me that was at 10am, you called at 4.45 the end of the trading day for me and I had no time to deal with you at that point, you couldn't get back to me in a reasonable time even though i specifically asked your new rep to relay the message, to me, you didn't think it was important enough to take your cell phone out of your pocket and just call me back at that time.

And this is not slander Jon,
slan·der***8194; ***8194;[slan-der] Show IPA
noun
1.
defamation; calumny: rumors full of slander.
2.
a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report: a slander against his good name.
3.
Law . defamation by oral utterance rather than by writing, pictures, etc.

I don't know how good your name was to begin with, I made the mistake of coming to you thinking you could handle the job and fix correctly the first time, not 3 subsequent visits in which I am STILL leaking oil. And all I did was report my impressions of your professionalism (rather lack there of) and report in LENGTH how I was treated and how the process went about. Nothing is fabricated in this report jon expect your perception of my shop.

Originally Posted by John@ImpressiveAutoCenter

This is going to be our final post on this thread. We just want to clarify a few things which forum members seem not to understand due to the OP original lack of factual information and aggressive attitude. People are questioning how the timing chain broke, this never happened, the timing chain guide broke which is a common issue on higher Mileage M3's since the OP's car had almost 100,000 miles on it. We never had an issue that we did not fix for the customer, every time he returned with an oil leak it was not the same one it was due to the various issues he was having. When he picked up the car after all work was completed there was oil on several parts of the engine and we offered to have it professionally steam cleaned for him to take off all oil residue, the OP denied it claiming he wanted to do it himself since he didn't trust people cleaning his engine bay. The oil that leaked from his car when he picked it up was a small drop most probably from left over oil residue which we told the OP prior to pickup. And to finally clear up the confusion about the rim. We did not fix the OP wheel we reimbursed him money to get it fixed since he wanted to get it done at his own specific location and had the wheel touched up quickly just so there was no silver curb rash on an all black wheel. We have to the very end tired to resolve any issues we could with the OP and are still willing to resolve anything that he wants us to do for him. Unfortunately every business does have clients that can never be fully satisfied. We do accept Forum members putting up reviews whether they are good reviews or improvement which need to be made on our part, but please stick to the facts and do not post with accusations and with an aggressive manner since we are ALWAYS willing to work to resolve all issues to our customer since we value all our customers. Thank you to everyone that had an open mind to the situation, it always helps us to improve our service.

Lets see what really happened here. Jon spoke with me and asked me specifically, "if i had changed the vanos bolts to the new updated BMW OEM part number", I replied, "yes jon, my shop changed those bolts, thanks". WHen the cover cracked he felt bad and said to me that, "If it was me I would have changed the guides at the same time as well and I believed because you said you changed the bolts that you had done the guides swell". OK jon so you cut corners and didn't check everything before completing a brand new motor with all new, alleged, OEM parts in it. You failed to due the correct due diligence and check the actual part itself which would have given you an answer and hopefully led you to inform me in which case we would have changed the guides when everything else was going on. Non of this is untruthful and jon you know that, thats the EXACT conversation we had.

I never told you not to clean my engine bay, you said you hit it with gasoline which got off most of the mess and that you would steam it, when i asked if that was done you said no you didn't want to do it incase something happened. again your lying and making it sound as if I directly told you not to do it which is just no the case, then again you also told me a full paint correction was only about 4-5 hours job, I OWN AND OPERATE MY OWN DETAILING gig which I do on my free time for yucks, I can tell you this that 4-5 is 2 correct steps of many in paint correction.
And again with this wheel, i told you to refund me, you said you wanted to give it a go, then without discussing the option with me you told you man to just refund the money and you used some touch up to attempt to make it look alright (it looks awful)

I made it known that I was meticulous to you Jon from the get go, I said don't let any fat asses sit in my car as my leather is important to me having cinnamon and I take extreme pride in my car, so much so that I had offers while it was in your shop to sell it.

And free dye and other hoses for this last repair? That was an installation error pal, and the dye was necessary to figure where it was leaking from as it was leaking even though you said you couldn't find a leak, remember? I asked you then if you drove the car to which you swiftly replied, "No i let it run for a few hours" well as I did say it was near the vanos due to the position of the oil drip under the car, and it did happen to be from that area in which you had just serviced, it is your responsibility to give it back to the customer in perfect working order as that is what the customer paid for? I did not pay to have it 80% fixed, or 89% fixed, I paid for professional services which would equate to 100% completed job, no oil leaks, no issues. This is not the case...



Lemmings, rest assured I will be addressing each of you soon enough I did not think anything any of the fan boys said required a direct response at all but certainly not until I got back to IMPRESSIVE against their allegations.

And to those members of the e46 community that have reached out to me via PM relaying their horror stories with this job, I applaud you for standing up and not sitting in silence, collectively I believe we can have some changes made but it's going to take the support of the community.

thank you guys for your continued kind words and understanding of the frustration I went through, money was never the object here at all, I made a HUGE mistake, arguably one of the largest ones in my life because I disregarded the garbage I read about the split between Leo (whom I have never met) and Jon and even some of the horror stories, I instead tried to look on the bright side of things and give them the benefit of the doubt. Live & learn.

Very Impressive I must say!

lol at "this is our last post in this thread"

pass the popcorn buddy

Originally Posted by E36 HaTeR

pass the popcorn buddy

Just waiting for a mod to come in and lock this thread in...5....4....3....2....

But I hope not... people need to see reviews. Whether positive or negative and this is a good read...

at the end of the day, if your paying thousands of dollars to get your car fixed, you want it fixed right the FIRST time and you want your car to be treated with the utmost care... i can see how the OP was upset and i completely agree, i'd be furious as well..

^Likewise. Especially considering the cash layed on the table.
Given a full rebuild was carried out, these sort of issues should not have happened!
If you guys were in the same position as OP, im sure you wouldnt be happy either.

something just like this happened with vlad and r3vlimited haha if anybody is familiar with r3v and knwo what im talking about hahahahaaaaa

sucks to hear this happened thoo man

Originally Posted by btober

something just like this happened with vlad and r3vlimited haha if anybody is familiar with r3v and knwo what im talking about hahahahaaaaa

sucks to hear this happened thoo man

LOL i heard about the vlad shenanigans over on rev and how he rips people off

So let me get this straight, you guys are only allowed to post positive reviews of shops on here? That's what some of these responses seem to imply..
No wonder they have such a good reputation.. Because people with bad experiences don't post them, for fear of the repercussions and responses like this.

Originally Posted by VinniE46

So let me get this straight, you guys are only allowed to post positive reviews of shops on here? That's what some of these responses seem to imply..
No wonder they have such a good reputation.. Because people with bad experiences don't post them, for fear of the repercussions and responses like this.

You've read this thread...it's not such a glowing review! LOL

Originally Posted by dmax

You've read this thread...it's not such a glowing review! LOL

I know. That's exactly my point, that the one review that is NOT positive gets looked down upon so much, as if it's not allowed to post negative reviews.

In before Impressive makes it worse... again

I can only speak for myself and others Ive encountered at Impressive....John has been a great asset / resource over the years. How many shops out there do you know of that gives away free oil changes, throws BBQ's, has Bikini Car washes, $200 bumper resprays, etc. etc.?!!? Their customer service is top notch and the work is affordable / quality. Just because you had a bad experience you shouldn't blast them on a public forum. Just my humble opinion.