“Guys in our service department are fantastic.”
A mechanic says he went to a dealership to inspect a used Acura his girlfriend was about to buy and told the salesman the brakes were finished. The salesman produced a 300-point inspection report saying they were fine, but the car started grinding within minutes of leaving the lot.
Can’t Stop Mobile (@cantstopmobile), a mobile mechanic in Dayton, Ohio, laid the whole thing out in an 11-minute, 16-second TikTok that has drawn more than 16,600 views since Tuesday.
“Well, we got scammed by the dealership,” he says at the top. In the on-screen text, he says this is the second time the dealership “scammed” him. Motor1 covered his previous viral complaint.
He says the dealership held him to what he could see standing up.
“So, I wasn’t able to jack it up and take things apart, because they don’t let you do that in the parking lot,” he says. It was enough. “I could tell that all the brakes were completely shot. Every single one across the board.”
The salesman had a document that said otherwise, he says.
“‘Our 300-point inspection said the brakes are fine.’ And I quote, ‘six millimeter in the front, five millimeter in the rear,’” he says he was told.
The salesman learning he was talking to a mechanic rather than a haggler did not move him.
“He says, ‘Hey, listen, the guys in our service department are fantastic. I have to go off this report. They have no reason to lie.’”
The rest of the car checked out, so they bought it, figuring the worst case was a $300 brake job he could do himself inside a year. “We had to believe the report since we couldn’t verify,” he says.
“Lo and behold, five minutes before she pulled into the parking lot after leaving the dealership, brakes started making noise—terrible noise, grinding noise,” he says.
He pulled the wheels and filmed what was left.
“I say 0% on the rear, literally 0% on the rear. Absolutely nothing left. That’s bare metal right here.” The fronts were at “maybe 10%.” On the report’s numbers: “60%? My [expletive], brother. Lying straight to our face.”
A new pad runs about 12mm thick, and Haynes puts the replacement point at “75% worn, or 3mm thick.” The 6mm and 5mm on the dealer’s report would have meant pads about halfway through their life, with a year or so of driving left in them. He says he found bare metal.
He took the footage back and says the dealership called him.
“I apologize. That’s just disappointing. My guys are better than that,” a representative says in a clip he plays. “They’re supposed to address that when it’s, you know—visually, those were pretty marginal. They needed to be replaced.”
He says the dealership replaced the pads and rotors. However, it did not replace the calipers, which he had also flagged as badly corroded.
“They look new, right? Hold on,” he says, pulling a wheel. “All they did was just paint it. half-[expletive] at that. This isn’t even trying. This is like rubbing dirt on the wound.”
He says his girlfriend called him 20 minutes into a drive with a hot wheel and the smell of brakes. A caliper had locked up. He tried to compress the piston on camera: “Oh man, that is stuck, stuck.”
He had taken flak online for calling the calipers in the first place. “I had so many people in the comments saying, ‘Just because they’re rusty doesn’t mean they need replaced,'” he says. “But when you do five brake jobs a week, you can tell when a caliper is on its last leg.”
Trade guidance is split on this point. Writing in Brake & Front End, technician Gene Markel says a caliper’s internal parts “can only be diagnosed by the symptoms and not visuals,” which is his critics’ point.
Markel also tells techs to check “the bracket for rust and corrosion that could prevent the caliper from moving” and opens on a customer returning months after a pads-and-rotors job with a noise: “Typically, it comes down to the calipers and hardware.”
Federal consumer guidance counsels that a dealer’s inspection is not the last word.
“A mechanical inspection is a good idea even if the car has been ‘certified’ and inspected by the dealer,” the Federal Trade Commission tells buyers. It anticipates the difficulty the video expounds on, advising buyers who cannot take a car off the lot to “find a mobile inspection service that will go to the dealer,” to get a written report with a repair estimate, and to remember that “spoken promises are difficult to enforce.”
In the comments section, Ojt695 said the pattern is familiar from the tech side: “I work at a dealership doing used car inspections. The salesmen know, we recommend replacing them and the managers decline the work. And when they come back we get blamed for it.”
Bucky_495 offered a different take on the diagnosis: “Not always the calipers. I’ve changed many rubber brake hoses for seemingly ‘calipers sticking.’ They delaminate internally and act like a check valve.”
Justinaxoxo5 asked a tough question: “Why would you buy it when you see they were obviously lying?”
Can’t Stop Mobile did the caliper job himself, at “an additional 150 bucks per caliper, plus my labor time.” His estimate for anyone without a mechanic in the family: “This would probably, easy, would have been an $800-plus job.”
Motor1 reached out to Can’t Stop Mobile via TikTok direct message for comment. We’ll be sure to update this if he responds.
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