Warranties do require scheduled maintenance. However they just require the maintenance listed in the owners manual, which can be quite a different story from the maintenance sold by the repair shops.
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Originally Posted by james t kirk
Way beyond that.
My best friend was a mechanic at a couple of GM dealerships. What they would do is when you bring your car in for service, say the wipers aren't working, they will tell you that you need a new module.
The reality was that the fuse was blown (say).
You pay 500 for the new module, but it never goes in your car.
The mechanic keeps the 500 part.
Now, you are thinking, well, what's he going to do with that part?
Answer, the parts department buys it back from him for 15 or 20 cents on the dollar.
Seriously.
I believe in changing the oil without fail, change the transmission oil at 50,000 km, and the coolant as well. Change the Air filter when it gets dirty, and the PCV valve and fuel filter every 100,000 km.
Other than that, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
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I used to work in a GM dealer and we never did anything that bad
A couple of guys did get fired for claiming to do repairs under warranty that they did not do. For example a customer would bring in a car with an oil leak, and it was the oil pan gasket. The tech would clean the engine off, maybe smear a little silicone around the oil pan in a halfhearted effort to slow the leak and send it on its way. When it came back still leaking the tech would claim that the cast aluminum pan was porous and would actually replace the pan, so he would get paid twice to do the job once. Supposedly they turned in the guys name and SS# to GM as a warranty thief when they fired him so he cannot do warranty work at any other GM dealer, but I don't know how true that is.
One thing we were always required to do though was bill out fluids on every repair, whether we needed them or not. For example if I replaced a water pump under warranty I didn't get paid to flush the entire cooling system so I just topped it off. I still had to bill out the full amount of antifreeze for the entire system though, or I got in trouble. Before you know it, I had 10 gallons of unopened antifreeze sitting on my workbench and I got yelled at for having too much laying around. I couldn't win