Another tip... This one for all the people who join "Dead Battery Club"
every month. There's a lot of people in this club - the factory battery
tends to crap out pretty early.
This only works if you're still under warranty. If you're not, it's time to
cough up some dough.
Your battery is a guaranteed item during the factory warranty. If it
happens to go out during dealership service business hours (I believe this
range is 6:30AM to 6:30 PM - call roadside support to confirm), the
dealership requires you to push/pull/tow/drag your vehicle to the nearest
dealership for battery replacement.
However, if your battery dies outside of those business hours,
Daimler-Chrysler is nice enough to authorize you to get back on the road
right away... Therefore, you can go to the store at night and buy whatever
battery you want, get your vehicle working, and then submit the receipt to
your local service department and they will reimburse up to $77 (the value
of the replacement factory battery they would give you). This way you can
pick whatever battery you want (to include Optimas) instead of getting
another one of those oversized bricks that seem to only last 24k miles. The
only catch is you have to spring for the battery out of your pocket and wait
7-10 days before the reimbursement check shows up in your mailbox.
Pretty straightforward? The only part "I'm not recommending" is that the
dealership doesn't check the old battery - you can give it to the store to
get your core charge back. I myself did truly have a dead battery and was
happy to upgrade to an Optima for less than $40 out of pocket, but the way
the system works, anybody could swap out their batteries at any time for a
better model and get the reimbursement. Darwin tip: Make sure your battery
receipt shows you bought it outside of business hours.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 06 2004 - 11:46:19 EST