Hello all:
I'm having some serious issues with the technical quality of Dealership
Mechanics. Two weeks into owning my Dakota (everything was peachy keen), I
was braking into a right hand corner. I heard a massive "bang!" from the
front end. I stopped, checked it out, everything seemed to be okay. Ever
since then, I've had a slight clunk when turning, accellerating, or braking.
I can feel it in the gas pedal, the brake pedal and the steering wheel. I
took the truck into Huntington Beach Dodge (see Dave in Fleet if you want to
buy a Dodge, but avoid their service department like the plague!) about a
month after the incident and they just shrugged ("We can't feel it") and acted
like I was insane. Admittedly, it wasn't incredibly noticeable back then, but
to someone who drove it everyday, I could feel it. I waited about a year and
took it into Tuttle-Click Dodge [A Five Star Dealer] in Irvine. They gave me
the same song and dance, ("We can't find it": it was more noticeable now) and
fixed the other thing I had it in for. A few months later I took it back in
for some other problems and mentioned that the clunk was getting worse. I
gave them all the TSB's on the truck and they replaced the intermediate
steering shaft. I don't get the 'click' I used to get when turning the wheel
through 180 degrees, but I still get the clunk and pop in the steering,
accellerator, and brake pedal. I waited until I needed to take it in again,
their service writer VERIFIED the problem, (this is at 35K mi, last Friday)
and they supposedly found a bad front wheel bearing that was causing the
problem. Well, I took the truck home last night, it still clunks and thunks
on accelleration/decelleration. Tomorrow the truck will be out of warranty by
mileage (It's a '98 SLT+), I don't want to sit still and take this. I'm going
to write a letter to Diamler-Chrysler. I need to know who I can write to and
get a response from. Have any of you had success with a DC contact? If so,
could you let me know? I want to write this letter to them, carbon copy the
zone manager, and the dealership: just so that everyone is on the same page.
I can't take any more days off of work to get a seemingly minor problem fixed.
Any help would be appreciated...
Shaun H.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Jun 20 2003 - 11:50:40 EDT