Whenever you take your car in for service, it’s expected that you will get your vehicle back eventually, right? Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case for a woman who attempted to get her Kia serviced at a dealership in Omaha, Nebraska. The first red flag was when the service department tore the engine apart without permission and told her that she needed a new one. Fortunately, Carshield paid for a new engine, but the shady business doesn’t stop there. The dealership eventually cut all contact with the owner and auctioned off her car without any notice or consent.
She initially asked the Nebraska dealership to handle things with her husband, as she was going to be routinely visiting a hospital. However, the service department wouldn’t talk to him because she was the sole registered owner of the Kia. It wasn’t until she had Kia Corporate find out what was going on that she discovered “the dealership auctioned it as ‘abandoned’ with absolutely no notice” to her. “I wrote a couple letters and again got no response,” she tells Reddit’s r/legaladvice. “What type of lawyer do I need to get to deal with this?“
The back-and-forth process between the owner and the Nebraska dealership went on for apparently over six months. This isn’t to say the service department is not in the wrong for selling off the Kia, but holding someone’s car for over half a year might not be something dealerships would normally do. “I’ve let this go on too long, I know that, and I don’t have any issues with them selling an abandoned vehicle but they were the ones who stopped communicating,” the owner tells Reddit.
She continues, saying, “This whole mess makes zero sense to me because Carshield was prepared to pay for the new engine, they just needed some stupid diagnostic paperwork which they said they did.” For reference, she initially mentions in the post that the service department refused to give her said paperwork for Carshield. Eventually, she discovered another bizarre development regarding the dealership: “Surprise, surprise the surprise manager is “no longer working” there,” she remarks. “Something tells me that I’m not the only one who complained to Kia about service at the dealership!“
The owner claims she’s trying to contact the ‘new owner’ of her vehicle, so hopefully, everything eventually gets resolved. A good lesson here, though: Don’t trust dealerships that have poor communication practices!
