D-Patrick Crawfordsville — Attraction in Crawfordsville

My son has been getting these recall letters about his passenger-side airbag and the power steering and it concerned me. I want him and his friends to be safe so I insisted on following up. It took him several weeks to actually get the appointment made but he eventually called them up. His car has been running perfectly since we bought it four years ago and continued to drive perfectly right up until we dropped it off at Etter. Never a problem outside of a flat tire. I drove with him to drop it off yesterday morning and it ran fine as per usual. He got a call that afternoon about all the things that are horribly wrong with it and urgently need to be replaced. I was not privy to the initial phone call and my son didn't know any better so he just trusted them when they said his battery, alternator, brakes and catalytic converter all need to be replaced. Luckily he only agreed to the battery until he could have a conversation with me. They "fixed" the recalled airbag and power steering and replaced the battery and we went to pick it up. The power steering no longer works. At all. The thing they were ethically and legally obligated to fix at no cost no longer works at all. I called to follow up and bring this to their attention and their response was "Yeah the alternator is bad. We'll have to change that out". This is ridiculous and unacceptable. All they had to do was make good on their obligation to correct the faulty engineering of Ford Company but apparently that isn't profitable so they had to invent a bunch of problems and ultimately leave the car in such a state of dysfunction that it is all but undrivable unless we agree to over a thousand dollars of further repairs. This is extortion. Etter Ford has reconfirmed and reinforced my well-founded distrust of dealership service departments. They are crooked and exploitative. I will be getting Etter's failures corrected at Froedge's where I know I can trust the people and the work.

FOLLOW UP: It turns out all of the thousands of dollars worth of repairs and replacements that Etter's wanted to charge us for were entirely due to a single blown fuse. The alternator is fine. In conclusion, Etter's is either incapable or unwilling to do basic mechanical repairs without exaggerating defects, padding the bill, or...

No pressure sales and straight forward process with no sales games being played.

Thanks for a great truck!

6 weeks later: I have to edit my review unfortunately. I now have a truck I am not legally allowed to drive. The temporary plates issued to me have expired, and I have been calling the dealership for multiple weeks and leaving messages and when I do talk to staff I am told they will get right back to me, only for them to never call back.

I called the IndianaBMV and the WisconsinDMV(my home state) and both told me the same thing, it’s in the dealers hands to send the paperwork in, and neither had the paperwork as of 6 weeks after purchase of the truck.

I am at the mercy of the dealership at this point to send paperwork or figure out where the paperwork is. I think, but I am not sure because not a single person at the dealership gave me an answer or will call me back.

It’s hard to drive a nice truck when it can only sit in your driveway.

Final Review: Purchased the truck June 11th, Wisconsin DMV received the paperwork July 23rd, but I wasn’t notified of this by D Patrick until July 29th after I updated my review to 1 Star here and my plates have already expired on July 25th.

Initial purchase was great, follow-up was really poor. Simple customer service- if you say “I will call you back” you call the customer back. If you say “I will make sure you have an answer before your temp plates expire” make sure you have an answer before the temp plates expire.

I am not convinced I would have had a call back if I didn’t update my review, which is disappointing.

All in all- really nice truck, very happy with it and the price. The initial sale was easy. The after sale left a lot...

On a cross country road trip vacation this summer, our air conditioning malfunctioned and was blowing hot air on the passenger side. It was almost 100 degrees out, and it was brutal in the car. I called several ford dealerships along the way and all of them surrounding Greencastle where we were staying, and Etter was the only one that would get me in right away. All of the others said that they were at least a couple of weeks out, but we were scheduled to head to the next stop in the Poconos in less than a week. Etter took it in the next day and worked on it immediately, finding that it was a computer program failure that only costed a couple hundred bucks to fix. They could have easily overcharged me, as I'd have paid about anything to have the AC fixed, but did it for the bare minimum and really helped me out in my situation with being flexible on the schedule. I could see that there were plenty of cars they were already working on, so clearly they went over and above for me. I couldn't be...