Costco vs Passport in Alexandria VA.

I had my tires mounted at Costco and when I went in I asked the clerk to ask the guy who was going to do the work to be extra careful with my wheels. I explained I was concerned that they would get dinged up during the install. She immediately got the manager over who said he would do the work himself if I could meet him before they opened the next day. This sounded great to me. I met the guy and he took his time, about an hour, to do the work. He was knowledgeable and polite and courteous through, he looked up the torque number for the lugs and torqued them to spec. Overall a very pleasant experience.

Passport Infiniti in Alexandra was a different story altogether. I took my car in just before I got my tires mounted at Costco. I had four things I wanted addressed. Oil change, heat shield rattle, wind noise from windows, I have a coupe and the clicking noise from the rear end. They changed the oil and the guy said he knew what the clicking noise was and fixed that. He said what I was hearing wasn’t wind noise but tire roar. Uh yea I know about the tire roar but over the obviously loud tire roar you could STILL hear the wind noise. So he didn’t do anything about that. He said he could remove the heat shield, what about fixing it? He took it off and the rattle is better but not eliminated. When he was telling me that I didn’t know the difference between wind noise and tire roar he also told me that my in cabin micro filter looked very dirty. I had told the guy when I was making my appointment that I had the 30 k service done at Nissan which he put in my record. What he didn’t put in the record was that I changed the filter myself. So I say, how could that be I changed it myself just a few weeks earlier. So he asks me if I used an original Nissan part. Umm you had it in your hand, cant you tell? I said yes of course. So he was like well it’s real dirty. I said don’t change it. Like they are going to go through the trouble of taking it out to look at it? I doubt it, but that’s what he said. Here is the kicker, he never mentioned that the white plastic door that holds the filter in place was broken, I broke it! The guy lied to me and that pisses me off. I actually checked my oil to make sure they changed it. I don’t think I should have to do that after taking my car to the service department. A few days later I got a survey and I explained the entire thing. I also wrote a letter to Passport Infiniti explaining what happened.

 

Don't do business with Passport - they're a bunch of lying a$$-holes.

I bought my 6MT coupe back in early 03 when they were still very hard to get. At the time you couldn't order the car - you just had to put down a deposit and wait for one to come in that was what you wanted. All of the dealerships (Jim Coleman, Rosenthal, Passport, Pearson-Richmond) had the same policy - leave us a check for $1000 to show you're serious. We won't cash it until the car comes in and you verify over the phone that you're going to buy. So I leave a $1000 check with all four. The car arrives at Richmond first, so I called the other three dealerships and asked them to tear up the check (plus I stopped payment just to be sure). Before the stop payment order went into place, Passport decided to cash the check anyway. Since I had almost emptied out my savings account for the down payment, the $1000 check cleaned me the rest of the way out. Although it didn't bounce, it caused three other checks that I had written to bounce, each of which cost me $25 in returned check fees plus the mark on my credit report.

I called Passport and was like WTF?!? The sales manager argued with me about their policy on deposits and told me I had clearly misunderstood Infiniti's policy. I told him that his interpretation differed from three other dealerships, and after much arguing, he decided to give me my money back. (They were going to just keep my money for backing out on "the purchase" even though they never had a car to sell me.) When I showed up at the dealership to get my check, the slimey sales guy that I had worked with had the gall to pursue me across the showroom floor to tell me that I had misunderstood him and that I was in the wrong for wanting the check back. Even after all the arguing, they still insisted that they would not reimburse me for the check bounces they had caused.

That's just my experience. I have friends that bought BMW's from Passport who have had similar bad experiences, mostly with the service department. It's a shady group in my opinion.