Lester Glenn Auto Group review: Displeasure with the service! 2

On August 2, 2005, my husband and I bought a 2004 Hyundai Sonata GL. On November 3, 2005, I went to my regular auto repair shop, OTA in Lanoka Harbor as I had a nail in one of the tires that needed to be repaired. They had to put the car up on a lift to repair it because they could not get the "locking" lug nuts off the wheel, which I did not realize that they were. On November 4, 2005, I contacted Lester Glenn to ask them for the lock, which they could not provide, but told me that they were replacing the locking lug nuts with a regular one.

On April 6, 2007, I went to OTA to get the oil changed, brakes checked and tires rotated. My mechanic found that Lester Glenn had only replaced one of the locking lug nuts and all of the 20 lug nuts were the wrong size, including the one initially replaced by Lester Glenn. It goes without saying, I hope, that if I ever got a flat tire and needed to change it, I would not have been able to without a great deal of frustration. OTA took hours to take the incorrect size lug nuts off and ruined their lug wrench doing so! OTA, whom I trust, replaced the lug nuts with the correct size and sold me a new lug wrench (since I had the old one which was the wrong size now).

When I tried to contact Lester Glenn about the situation, I spoke to Zina, the Customer Service representative, who was very much on the defensive and wanted to see receipts for the job OTA had done, so I called my mechanic, Jeff, of OTA, who is also the owner of his business and he graciously agreed to FAX the bill to Lester Glenn. He also offered to call Zina and speak to her about it and explain the problem to her. When I later asked him how the phone call went, he was stunned and said that they got into a screaming match and subsequently told him that he didn't have the right equipment and that's why he couldn't get the lug nuts off.

I decided to take my complaint to the President of Lester Glenn, Stan Kraushaar. After I finally reached him and explained the situation briefly, he said he would have to speak to Zina and would get back to me. We played phone tag for a few weeks and Zina phoned and left a message that she "picked up a message from Stan," and that she "didn't know which Stan it was" but she was returning my call. So I called Stan Kraushaar again, but this time he seemed annoyed and wondered why Zina hadn't called me "because she was supposed to." I told him that she had and that I thought she had picked up his message from me by mistake so I was calling him.

The gist of what was said was he told me they could not even find that the car was sold to me in their records. He also stated that the car was three years ago sold to me and what did I expect them to do about it three years down the road. (It hasn't even been two years yet!) Furthermore, why didn't I give them a chance to right the wrong before letting another mechanic shop fix it. I explained that I did give them a chance, but at this point he really wasn't listening, as he said the only reason he was letting me talk was that he didn't intend to be impolite. He stated that he felt his dealership had no responsibility towards my car or my problem. I informed him in that case I was going to relay my displeasure with the Better Business Bureau, the Consumer Affairs and Asbury Park Press Troubleshooter, to which he said, "You certainly have every right to do what you feel you have to."

Lester Glenn Buick-Pontiac-GMC
230 Route 37 East
Toms River, NJ 08753