Dishonest, untrustworthy, sloppy Pro Nordic

I am bitterly disappointed with this Volvo car service centre. Our liaison person was Braydon. The car, Volvo XC90 was due for its annual service. I contacted Pro Nordic and spoke to Braydon and asked him to send us a quote. It arrived, in the amount of R4,200. We accepted and took the car in. Braydon called me and immediately advised a plethora of extras that ‘needed attention’, pushing his quote up from R4, 200 to over R35,000. I immediately became suspicious, because of 2 items: 1) "You need to replace your brake discs." I asked why the discs needed replacing, he said they are worn. This was a lie, because I had checked them 1 day before taking in the car, in preparation for just such a ploy, and the discs were perfectly smooth and level, not even a scratch on them. I said leave the discs. 2) He said the drive shafts need to be reconditioned. This I found hard to believe. I asked him how this was possible that they could only last such a short time, because the service book shows that the drive shafts were reconditioned 13,000 kilometres previously, by them, actually ? He said they are prone to ware. (One can hear when drive shafts are shot, as they will emit a tok-tok noise when turning - our car does not do this at all, the car feels perfect.) I told him to leave it. Then he came back and said the drive-shaft seal needed replacing, and for this he would have to remove the drive-shaft to replace it. Since it is the same labour cost and process for reconditioning, I might as well have the shaft reconditioned since it will already be out. I said ok. So now from R4,200 then to R35,000, we were down to R14,000. An hour or so before when he said we could collect the car, my wife asked him to put all the old parts which he replaced during the service in the boot of the car. He said OK, will do. Then he phoned a bit later to advise that we could not have the car back that day, it had to stay the week-end, because it's idling badly. I found this hard to believe and communicated this to him, because the service did not involve touching/servicing any part of the ignition system. His reply was that they had to replace a tappet cover gasket, and this gasket was not sealing properly, sucking in air, causing the bad idling. I've never heard of such rubbish - I used to work on my own cars for years, so know the basics of engines considerably more than the average novice. There was also no evidence at all that a tappet gasket needed replacing. Next, when my wife fetched the car, she forgot to look, and only looked in the boot once home – we found no replaced old parts in the boot as we instructed him to do. We called him to query this. His answer was "They must've forgotten to put the replaced parts in the boot”, and that he'd remind them to put it aside for us to collect. He knew we were leaving the following day on holiday, so this would afford him plenty of time to get 'his story' together regarding 'replaced parts'. Then while on holiday, we notice a red fluid leaking from the car. I checked the brake fluid levels to try and trace the source. In doing so, I noticed an engine cover (not the main one) was cracked in half. I immediately called him to query, he said the car came there like that. I doubted this, so went to my DEKRA report which I had done a few months previously when I bought the car. The report found nothing wrong in the engine compartment inspection. Next, I called the previous owner, who also confirmed that no cover was ever broken on the engine. I then communicated this to Braydon via Whatsapp, telling him to replace the cover. He denied it was their fault and then stopped talking to me. This company, via Braydon, strikes me as sloppy, dishonest, untrustworthy, out to wring every possible penny out of the unsuspecting client. So, this is a warning to any would-be client, that you will be in for some bad stuff when you take your car to Pro Nordic. In conclusion, I took the car to Pro Nordic only because they had a history with the car. But when the problems arose, I decided to do some digging, and came across another review about Pro Nordic on Hello Peter, which described similar sloppy service, bad attitude and horrendously high costs experienced by the reviewer, with the same warning as I'm giving now. If only I had seen this client's review about his experience with Pro Nordic, I would never have taken my car there. So be warned.