September 2022 by David B.
I am VERY UNHAPPY with the service I received with Dino at C Harper Kia in Belle Vernon, PA on August 15, 2022. The quick version: My 2018 Kia Optima, which is still under warranty, was having occasional problems with the air conditioner. Dino told me that since the A/C was blowing cold air that day they were not willing to even check the freon level to see if it was low, UNLESS I was willing to PAY $169 for their labor, for a task that I believe takes less than 5 minutes, and on a car still under factory warranty! More details: There is an intermittent problem with the air conditioner. It would occasionally have very limited airflow and the air was not cold, making the car very uncomfortable. Each time this happened the A/C seemed fine the next day. After they checked my car Dino came back to say "that air conditioner was working fine, blowing cold air", which we both knew when he took the car in for service. Dino said he thought the problem was that the A/C was freezing, a conclusion I had already reached based on information I had found from several different sources on the internet. The most likely causes for this, I had learned, were: 1) low freon level, 2) dirty or clogged cabin air filter, 3) dirty condenser evaporator coils. When Dino told me the A/C was working fine and there was nothing more they could do, I asked if the technician has checked the freon level. He looked through the service report and said no, that had not been checked because it was blowing cold air. When I shared what I had learned from the internet Dino said "If you look long enough you can find anything you want on the internet". I finally got him to acknowledge that low freon might be a cause of the problem I was experiencing and he agreed to take the car back in the shop to ask the technician to check the freon. Dino returned about 20 minutes later and told me that they weren't willing to check the freon level unless I would pay $169 for the labor required to "connect the car to a complicated machine and pump all of the freon out of the system, ...". He said it was a lot of work and that Kia would not reimburse them for it if there was no problem. I was pretty sure it was much less work than he described (which I later confirmed). When I reminded Dino the car was having a problem, was still under warranty, and the check I wanted to be done is one of the possible causes of the problem, he still wouldn't budge. "We're in business to make money" he told me. He eventually offered to "split the difference" with me, so I would only have to pay half of the cost he quoted. I left after telling him that if I was going to pay anyone to perform service on something still under warranty, it would NOT BE THE DEALERSHIP/COMPANY who is supposed to honor the warranty. My previous experiences with service at other Kia dealers had all been positive, not at all like my very disappointing experience at C Harper Kia in Belle Vernon.
