Dealership Service Technicians Joyride a Customer’s C7 Corvette Z06

By
Keith Cornett
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9
5481

Dealership Service Technicians Joyride a Customer's C7 Corvette Z06

Photo Credit: NyteFall’s Cars and Stuff


Over the years we have seen some pretty shady behavior by dealership service techs taking advantage of a Corvette while under their care. Apparently, this just happened again with an owner posting the video to YouTube. That video has since been pulled, but thanks to our friends at Carscoops.com, we still have some of the details to share.

The story goes that the owner of a C7 Corvette Z06 with a YouTube channel named NyteFall’s Cars and Stuff was having a misfire issue and took the car to Modern Chevrolet in Burlington, NC, for service. After dropping off the car on Monday, July 31st, he was expecting to have it back in time for the weekend. However, the dealer never got to the car, so he picked it up on that Saturday.

The C7Z was then dropped off a second time on Monday, August 7th. Again, the week passes, and the dealer still hasn’t even looked at the car as of Saturday, August 11th. The Z06s owner then reached out to GM Customer Service and that apparently greased the wheels, but still it took the dealer another two weeks to figure out the misfire was due to a faulting fuel injector.

Once his car was back in his possession, he realized his sunglasses were missing and decided to pull up the video on his dashcam to see what he could find. Instead of finding his glasses, he found two different service technicians had taken out his car for some hard pulls, and one of them even picked up a female passenger to show how fast the car was.

After picking up his lady passenger, the first tech decided to do a hard pull in the Z06 and was in the higher end of 3rd gear when the dashcam captures that he was in a 45-mph zone. Driving a C7 Z06 hard in third gear means the car was probably doing somewhere between 70-100 mph. On the second pull, the technician nearly lost control and almost crossed into the oncoming lane. It was then that the female passenger realizes the dashcam is recording and says, “It’s probably filming everything you’re doing too.” Once that was pointed out, the technician miraculously obeys the traffic laws for the rest of the ride.

Dealership Service Techs Joyride a Customer's C7 Corvette Z06


A second technician is recorded taking out the car and also jumps on the gas to see what the car can do. “Oh my god, this thing is fast,” he says and then exclaims “it’s good” several times before saying, “Gotta make sure it’s good for the customer.”

The owner never did find his sunglasses, and after complaining to the dealership his service costs were refunded. That probably explains why the video was made private. “This does not make up for the potential damage they did or could have done to my car,” and he adds “any remaining trust I had at the time of realizing they stole my sunglasses was shattered after viewing the footage.”

The moral of the story when dropping off your Corvette off to a dealership for service work is to put the PDR in Valet Mode, or if you don’t have a PDR, a dashcam is the next best thing. While this incident ended without any damage, the owner of the car could have faced legal liability for any accidents or damage due to leaving the car at the dealership.


Source:
Photo and screenshot by NyteFall’s Cars and Stuff
Carscoops.com and CarBuzz.com

Related:
[VIDEO] Another Chevy Tech Takes a C8 Corvette Joyride and Hits 148 MPH in Heavy Traffic
[VIDEO] Lawyer Weighs In On Chevy Technician Who Joyrided a Customer’s C8 Corvette
[VIDEO] Dealership Technician Caught Joyriding in a Customer’s Corvette

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9 COMMENTS

  1. Car “owner” facing legal liability? How’s that? Makes no sense. You do not give permission to mechanics to drive the car and break laws as they please.

  2. Insane… those techs should be fired. How unprofessional.

    @rtbasey – my only thought… and these are state by state and depend on insurance laws. Someone is still driving a persons car, and in the world of lawyers, if a third party was injured, their legal team would include the owner in any suit. Whether it was sane or not. To be honest, any judge with 2 brain cells would throw that portion of the suit out.

  3. I linked that to a previous article featuring Steve Lehto of LehtosLaw.com who discusses a previous joyride event. He says two considerations are at play:

    Owner Liability which means that no matter who was driving it, it’s still your property and it’s your insurance on the car. If the technician got into an accident in the car, you as the owner of the vehicle would most likely be named a defendant in any lawsuit.

    The second point he makes is regarding Conversion, which is where the owner of the Corvette gave possession of the car to the dealership, who then used it in a manner that’s contrary to the owner’s legal rights. Lehto uses a famous scene from the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to illustrate Conversion.

  5. Luckily I trust my Corvette wiz, if he needs to take it out and stand on it go for it. The cars are made for it, probably shouldn’t be picking up passengers though. Showing off to some little honey, guys do shit like that ya know:)

  6. I only take my Corvettes for service to one particular Chevrolet dealer in town that employs a Corvette Master Technician who’s been working on Corvettes for almost 40 years. With him the work is always done right the first time and he wouldn’t even dream of joyriding in customer’s cars.

  8. The other reason to put the car in valet mode is just in case they damage it while driving or with the engine on. I have had a performance shop scrape the heck out of my splitter (they owned up and had it fixed and repainted, so kudos to them), a dealership scrape the front bumper, and a repair shop scrape the side skirt. Unfortunately I am terrible at remembering to put valet mode on and I probably couldn’t have at the performance shop since they were doing a tune. But whatever it is about these cars, they seem to get damaged a lot if you take them in for service. I do a lot of my own work, but in these cases thw work really needed a lift which I don’t have. I’m not a fan of laying on my back under a 3600 lbs car, even with 4 jack stands.

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