My experience here was fine at first, until I had my car's engine seize the day after getting it back when I only put 30 miles on it. When I left a review with less stars my review was hidden so I was forced to give more stars. I had taken in my 2013 VW CC with the 2.0 TSI in for a very small oil leak diagnosis at 80,000 miles. I payed the bill and got the car back, Mike was good to interact with and seemed very knowledgeable, it had no issues other than the oil leak. The oil cooler and some other parts needed to be taken apart, I had Mike do a carbon cleaning on the intake valves also as the intake needed to come off. On the ride home on the highway hitting a bit higher than 3500 rpm things sounded a bit different than I remembered but what could be wrong, my car was just at a Euro mechanic and had the carbon cleaned out. The next day I drove the car only 2 miles around my city and I noticed it was getting a bit bad gas mileage but nothing crazy. Then I had used my car later again in the day to go to the gym and started it up and it started making ticking as the rpms increased. The car gave no check engine light or oil pressure light, the car was never low on oil either when it was given to this shop, I’m knowledgeable about cars and have done plenty of work to this car myself. I was very close to home and drove it home and shut it off, the car never started again and had no check engine light other than a “starter motor is mechanically blocked or has mechanically malfunctioned”, which only appeared after the car would not start. Towed it back to Mike's shop and he had it for so long I started to wonder what was going on. Well it turned out he went on a 10 day holiday break without telling me after the car had already been towed back to his shop. So 20 days later I don’t get a diagnosis, I receive a repair estimate for installing a used engine with 10,000 mileage more than the car had, with a new timing chain for a whopping 6800 dollars, and only a lousy 3 month warranty, no sorry was given on top of it all. He didn’t offer any discount of any sort or offer a true diagnosis other than “I think it spun a bearing” after finding metal pieces in the oil pan. Taking this to small claims court would have been a headache in itself so I had another shop install a used engine with a new timing set, 13k miles lower than the engine Mike had, a year warranty that included labor, and all for 1000 dollars less than what Mike offered. No way I was paying this guy to install a high mile motor with a bad warranty for 7 grand, after he had just given my car back to me and it failed the next day. I’ll give him a small benefit of the doubt that the car had a prior issue that just happened to occur after I left the shop. It’s very hard to see it that way as there was no diagnosis on the motor and the fact I have driven this car on far trips along with constantly checking the oil level and topping as needed and only ever had a issue of a flat tire until it got the tiny oil leak it came in for. Mike also would not reply to the emails sent to him asking about what happened to the car etc, everything was over calls only.
