What I want from AAMCO

Basically, I want a refund. Certainly some kind of settlement. I don't want to take the car back to that branch, for one thing.

What pisses me off is that I could have done the job myself, taken the engine and tranny out, fixed the engine problem (which is either valve stem seals or rings) and put a brand new or reconditioned tranny in at the same time.

As it is, I'm stuck with a car that blows smoke, a tranny that I'm suspicious of, and am $1300 out of pocket at the same time.

Let's see what AAMCO have to say about all this, shall we?

Will I get a refund?

How quick will the be to resolve the issue?

Let's see, shall we?

First email to the company:

I'm not satisfied with the service at all.
I was driving my car one day about a month ago when I found it suddenly wouldn't shift up. I drove it for a while, pretty carefully, and then got to the AAMCO transmissions place I knew on S. Lamarr in Austin. By the time I got there, the car was blowing a lot of blue smoke from the exhaust. I figured that maybe I'd damaged the engine by driving it in a low gear. I asked the manager - Joel - if it was likely that was what I'd done and he told me it wasn't. He told me that there is a vent that runs from the transmission to the exhaust, and it would be venting smoke that way. I immediately felt suspicious, as I'm unaware of such mechanisms. I know enough about cars to know that the engine is the engine and the transmission is the transmission. I told Joel that if the car was blowing smoke that he SHOULD NOT PROCEED WITH THE TRANSMISSION REPAIR, as I knew that having a car with a smoking engine was a waste of time, and I might as well take both the engine and transmission out myself and do the whole job. But he assured me that that wasn't so. I checked into transmissions (the only part of a car I've never worked on) and found that the vaccum modulator may have been causing the problem. When I suggested that, he agreed. I asked him how long it would take to do the job. He told me it would be done by Monday (this was a thursday morning). I knew I could do the job myself. I could get a transmission myself, drop the old one out, and put the new one in, but it might take me a few days, so I agreed that he should do it. So I let him. He told me it would cost $1300, cash. So then, of course, it wasn't ready on the monday as he said it would be. He assured me it would be ready on the tuesday. It wasn't. Then the wednesday morning at 11. Then 1. Then 2. Then he announced that he'd put it all together and it didn't change up, which is exactly what it was doing when I took the car in. Then it was finally ready on the thursday afternoon, eight days after I took the car in. And it still blows smoke. And it's still got peculiar gear shifts and clonks. And I'm pissed. And I DO NOT WANT TO TAKE IT BACK TO JOEL, who I consider to be unreliable at best, a liar at worst.
I've paid out $1300 to repair a car that may not have been worth repairing, or that may not have needed a full transmission repair anyway.
And this is what I'm going to do: I'm going to start my own website to see just how you react to this complaint, and to see just how reliable AAMCO are as a global company. The Lamarr branch already has an unresolved complaint at the BBB, I've discovered.
Please let's work with this. If I don't have to make a lot of noise then I won't. But I feel I've had the wool pulled over my eyes, and I don't like it.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Jack Lee.