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I wanted to share the following story with my fellow Brickboarders, and hopefully hear feedback from people who have had similar experiences.
I brought in my '89 Volvo with 107K miles to a local garage for State Inspection. I also wanted them to check out a tranmission oil leak. When I came back to pick up my car, the guy who runs the place says to me: 'You should know that you failed the emission test, but we passed you anyways because we like you'. At which point I was like, 'OK, thanks...'. My bill had the usual $35 on it for the inspection. I went to have a talk with the mechanic regarding the tranny oil leak, and when I came back to pay my bill, the owner had added another $25 to my bill. When I asked him what this was about, he goes, "Oh, come on, if you would have brought your car to another place, they would have charged you a lot of money to fix your car to pass the emission test. I did you the favor of passing you, at least let me regain some money on my expenses of the emission test". At this point I already smelled a rat - I asked him, "I don't get it - your expenses are already covered in the $35 I paid you, why the additional charge???". At this point the guy starts verbally assaulting me about how ungrateful I am, about how he can't stand costumers who don't appreciate what people do for them, up to the point where he calls me a 'cheap f*ck' and that he doesn't want me to ever come back to his place. This guy got so out of hand that one of his own mechanics came into the office and had him take the $25 off my bill, saying exactly what I was saying: that the emission test is covered by the $35 and he had no business charging me more for it. Eventually I was just happy to get out of his store and leave him and his obviously dying business (if he needs to squeeze in $25 like that he's obviously not doing great) in their misery.
The issue I wanted to bring up, besides an obviously ugly encounter with a sleazeball: from what I am hearing from many friends, it is almost impossible to defraud a state emission test! At least here in NY, the Departement of Motor Vehicles has all sorts of measures installed to prevent shops from passing costumers that really fail the emission test! They have cameras installed, it's impossible to manually enter false data, etc. So I am getting the feeling that the owner of said shop didn't 'do me a favor' at all and just wanted to make more money off an unsuspecting costumer. My test results are WAY below limits, so I am thinking that my car passed with flying colors and the guy just wanted to rip me off.
Can anyone confirm this? Is it possible to defraud the State Emission Test? Also, does anyone have similar experiences?
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