Fellow members,

I have been around cars my entire life and have never experienced what I'm about to tell you. After having my car at a well know shop for four months the day came it was finally done. I payed my final bill and was excited to drive home. The car drove well on the way home but upon arrival after my excitement I decided to do a quick visual of the car. Upon my inspection the first thing I noticed was that the front passenger wheel was missing two lug nuts and the drivers side was missing one. I'm so sickened by the lack of professionalism that I'm truly at a loss. Please let me know how you would handle the situation. All I can think about now is if they left lug nuts off what else should I be worrying about. I'm afraid to drive the car!

 

the first thing i noticed was an apparent lack of parental responsibility and/or judgment. it's one thing to risk your own life, quite another to risk the lives of other motorists and your children at the same time.

i'd handle the situation by locking you up.

count yourself lucky.

 

Can someone please tell me if I'm over reacting??? I have to believe that If anyone on this forum brought their car to a performance shop and got it back with multiple missing lug nuts they would be very angry. 72 people viewed this with no response.

 

Did you go back and edit out the part highlighted by 02?

I had a shop one time put all my lugs on but not tighten any of them. I figured it out pretty quickly when I got on the highway, so I went right back to the shop where they apologized profusely and fixed everything up, and I went about my life.

Your bigger issue might be the part you took out - the shop can't really fix that for you.

 

You'd feel it vibrating badly long before a wheel would come off.

 

There are several things I recommend.

Every time you have your car in for a service or a repair when you go to pick up the car be prepared to have to leave it to have something else attended to.

Every time you have your car in for anything you before you accept the car back you need to do a walk around and pay particular attention to things/areas that were or might have been "touched" in servicing/repairing the car.

For instance if the car is in for new tires check the tires are all new tires, the right ones, if uni-directional mounted the right way. Count the lug bolts.

For an oil service I check that the oil filler tube cap is on -- the techs where I have the cars worked on never leave this off but I have a time or two -- and there's not a big mess. I check the oil level before driving away.

And so on.

If you find something amiss or questionable you bring it to the attention of the service manager or shop manager/foreman.

Be prepared to leave the car. If you accept the car this signals to the shop you wil accept possibly sub-par work/service.

What to do about the missing lug bolts? Well, since you have the car call the shop and report this and ask what the shop willl do. While you drove the car home I'd not necessarily drive it back to the shop. Either the shop will send somone out with the missing lug bolts and a torque wrench to install them or send a flat bed truck out to pick up the car and bring it back to have these installed.

What did the shop have the car for 4 months for? Makes no difference I guess. All you can do is I guess inspect the work that was done -- didn't the shop manager/foreman walk you around the car or at least discuss what was done? 4 months is a long time to keep a car -- and if you see something questionable take the car back.

In the meantime drive the car and keep a close eye on everything. Kind of treat it like a new car and give it some shakedown time to get the know the car again and know everything is working as it should be.

If the car starts to misbehave, leak, or in any way manifest any signs of any trouble take the car back. Note that even if the car manifests any signs of trouble this may not be due to the work that was done.

 

How would I handle the situation ? I'd go over there next morning (don't drive your car)- check if the lug nuts are tight if not there's your answer - also take some pictures, show them the picture's and be pretty MAD about it. ask them to order new lug nuts. Shop owner won't be happy, and probably will scream at anyone who worked on your car.

Sometimes they move around too fast around cars. Seen that before, where the shop owner told the guy to tight all the nuts, * mechanic forgot * he took the car for a spin, car felt WEIRD, he almost fired the guy.

- we can't fix stupid - I used to own many cars in the past, I was still in that stage where I was learning how to work on my own cars ((( I remember when I had BAD lower control arm. that needed to be replaced, the guy put grease around it, (i found that out later ) so it stopped making noises , I thought it was fixed, and one day i was turning into a parking spot and it snapped ** i was so mad and so pissed, but nothing i could do about it ~ imagine that IF it happened on the hway at high speed.

That's some serious *** chit.

 

Other than getting your lug nuts back from the shop, there is probably not much you can do other than be mad, move on, and not give that shop your business again. It was probably an honest mistake. It happens.

One reason I like to take my car to my small shop mechanic is that the owner/mechanic does all the work himself. When you have multiple sets of hands working on a car, you open the door to things being overlooked as individual responsibility is diminished

 

How would I handle? First thing is pick up the phone and be like WTF man!!!
What did the shop say?
I hoped you re-torqued the remaining. Then i would request they pick up the car and ask them to do an inspection for anything else, oil drain plugs, suspension nuts and bolts if they did any of that. Usually in cases like this its a careless tech not necessarily the owner but they should take responsibility.
Can you please share what shop as I live in NJ also.

 

I agree...You should definitely bring it to the attention of the owner of the shop. Things could have been MUCH MUCH worse, that shop needs to realize the error they made. They need to have a protocol in place for prior to handing keys over to the customer. Maybe you can save someone's life by bringing this to their attention!

 

When I bought my car it was missing 2 lugs on different wheels. I could tell as soon as I hit the freeway. PPI done at the stealership in San Jose missed it. The car had aftermarket wheels previously, but the tires were worn out so they switched it back to sell the car. They must have lost 2 in storage.

 

LOL
Good thing you ain't sheriff over here (Germany - not France). You'd have an awful lot to do and you'd need one big a.. jail! Our regular commute from home to Freiburg has a 15km section of autobahn. Traffic permitting, I regularly bounce the big, lumbering Range Rover off the 125mph speed limiter with the entire family on board. So do many, many others in everything from VW Passat wagons to MB GL's to by far the largest group of high speed family transporters: BMWs. My wife prefers being a passenger in a Porsche at speeds of over 200kph due to the lumbering nature of the Range Rover.

There was once a similar discussion on a German board, but it was because the poster admitted to taking his 996 tt cab to over 300kph (186mph) with his wife and sleeping baby boy on board - while following a Lexus LFA.

 

You did 150 with your kid in the car? Dude please from fathers everywhere drive easy when your kids are in the car. Kids are precious.

Missing a couple nuts is likely a small oversight at the end. When they have cars for a while usually the get 2-3 lugs just to move the car on and off the hoist. As long as they were tight one trip is ok. Get the rest installed asap the.

 

If you're on the autobahn where people drive that fast normally and other drivers expect cars coming that fast is one thing. That doesn't exist in North America. .

 

lol. sure ok, but have you ever been on a new jersey turnpike?!

"Traffic permitting" is the operative here

in any event, i'm guessing that the only thing true about the initial post is the missing lug nuts as the report of going 150 with your kid in the car on a NJ hi way ( maybe he was just going around the block?? ) is the automotive equivalent of a "fish tale" that gets larger with each telling LOL.

bottom line is that if true? missing lug nuts and a kid in the car at 150+ is a recipe for a disastrous evening news report, and i object, whether true or not.

but, no matter.