Ok so I just kinda wanted to ask about this. A couple months ago I blew my engine/turbos. I had modified the car with a ecu tuner, and air intake. They said the ecu tuner made the turbo's shred the fins and they essentially ate themselves and sent metal shavings through the engine. I had to pay out of pocket 26k for the new engine/turbo's/piping etc. I de-modded the vehicle before taking it in because I believed the ecu tuner/intake was not the cause of the problem. I looked at several sources before taking everything off and found no one had this problem with that tuner only the more powerful ones. I know if it WAS the tuner then it's my fault and I can live with that and have already paid for it. The question is of something the dealership did. They told me they went online and found pictures of my posts on a local forum with my license plate in my signature where I had stated I had the mods. Is this something I should have complained to the parent company about? OR taken some kind of legal action? I'm not trying to argue that if the tuner did cause the problem that it's my fault. But I dont believe it would have caused that much damage within one day, (had a noise one night and the engine and all was gone the next day with maybe 3-4 miles of driving home from hearing the sound.) What would you guys do in this case? Does anyone have any comments on courses or actions I could take? Thanks everyone for their time and help.

 

335?

 

You are wondering if you should have taken legal action against the dealer or the tuner? I'm a little confused? If it was on a public forum anyone can source the pictures but if they were put online by the tuner and that led to the problem I would certainly try to do something about that.

 

Sorry for the confusion, yes a 335 and no the dealer. Not the tuner, also from what i've been talking about with mechanics the parts I had wouldnt have caused the damage, so i'm thinking the dealer completely screwed me and lied.

 

You have no recourse about how they found out about your mods. You may have recourse under the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson-Moss_Warranty_Act), but you'd need to pursue an action. Do you still have the engine and turbos that the dealer removed? If not, you'll have a hard time establishing fault. In theory, the onus is on the manufacturer to prove that your mods caused the problem, but in reality, they'll show up with their own engineers stating that your mods placed unintended stress on the engine, and you'll need to find a way to prove otherwise. Without the dead engine, you'll have a hard time finding a credible witness.

People do win these cases, though, but at perhaps considerable expense in legal fees.
At this point, it may be time to suck it up.

 

Thank you very much for your time and help. No unfortunately the original pieces were sent back as "cores". With the massive money loss i've already taken, and the extremely tight financial situation i'm in right now as you say pursuing it legally would be way to expensive and probably completely fruitless at this point. I am pretty much going to have to suck it up it seems. Thank you all for your help again. Seems i'm just in a completely SOL year right now.

 

You're welcome. Sorry I didn't have more definitive news, but I suspect your best course at this point is the one you're going with.

 

Who was the tuner?

 

Your response was more than helpful, but yes at this point i'm pretty much stuck along this path, and i'll be ok, just broke for a long time. Once my mil. retirement checks start to come in i'll be ok and be able to really get out from under the problem. So no worries just gotta keep my budget right and everything will be fine. Tuner was Burger motorsports btw. I still dont believe it was his product that caused the problem btw, car ran flawlessly up until everything happened. I believe the turbo's were faulty and just went. No actual damage caused by any of the parts.