My partner took his car into Midas for a general service and waited in the local area for 4 hours before getting a call from the manager Gary to state that he hadn’t done any work on the car, because it needed a head gasket repair. He quoted $1650 and said the car was in otherwise perfect condition, so he strongly recommended to go through with the repairs. Was given an estimation of 5 days for the fix. 11 days later and after many phone calls to check the status of the car (some not well received by Gary) the car was ready to be picked up. Driving it home, he noticed something didn’t feel quite right, it was also stalling when in reverse. The radiator was completely full of oil, despite being told they had flushed it repeatedly. We took the car back for them to look and was told the radiator wasn’t dirty enough to be flushed, and they adjusted to idle to try combat the stalling. They also found another issue with the carby and quoted a further $450. When I questioned Gary as to why he didn’t see the carby issue before, he blatantly said he didn’t check it and made false claims. Gary told us the car was perfect condition beside the gasket and that is why we opted to fix it. The car itself wasn’t worth over $1600 so we didn’t want to put over $2000 into the car! We also found that the workshop lost the power steering fluid cap and it was our responsibility to pick up a new one. At this point, we requested a refund as the sale was made under false claims of the cars condition. We were denied by Gary and laughed at by the tradespeople. Even though the Midas guarantee states that these issues are to be dealt with in store, Gary refused to even discuss it, hiding away in the workshop instead. After big discussions with head office, consumer affairs and Gary, the car was eventually paid to be TOWED to ABS a few weeks later (the car was now not drivable and oil was overflowing from the radiator). Midas chose ABS as a second opinion. Here they found the car to blow smoke, misfire and quoted $2500 for a complete new engine. It was then that head office chose to give us the refund we requested a few weeks prior. So choose Midas if you want to be messed around with for a month, have your car come back in worse shape than it left you, and eventually have to scrap your car!
Whenever I have taken my own car into Midas, I have had thousands of extra dollars work of work quoted, none of which any other mechanic can find or justify. I suppose they like to try and take advantage of women as well.
However Rob at ABS Salisbury and Dan from Midas head office were both very helpful.