A local news station in Atlanta, WSB-TV, is reporting that customers of Take 5 Oil Change have experienced severe damage to their vehicles. They interviewed a consumer whose car’s engine was smoking immediately after getting his oil changed there – and whose car was out of commission for more than six months afterwards. He even lost his job because he couldn’t drive to work.
Consumers in Florida, Texas, and other states have complained about Take 5 Oil as well, with the news report describing their experience as “oil change nightmares.”
So if you’ve had an oil change nightmare, is there anything you can actually do about it?
Yes – and the attorneys at Kneupper & Covey have successfully handled numerous cases where a car has been totaled from a bad oil change. Depending on what happened to you, we may be able to help.
If you want us to look at your situation Click Here to Submit Your Claim. There’s no cost for our evaluation.
Many oil change companies think they can just have you sign a contract that says you’ve waived all your rights and there’s no warranty, and they’ll be fine. But that’s rarely true. It depends on state law – but most states have protections against these kinds of waivers. They don’t let companies eliminate their liability altogether, and there are usually many exceptions. Some states don’t allow their consumer protection statutes to be waived at all.
So just because you signed a contract (which the company wrote) doesn’t mean everything they put in there is enforceable.
It all depends on what you can prove, which is true in any lawsuit. The strongest cases are when someone goes in and gets their oil changed, and they see problems with their car virtually immediately. In that scenario, it’s hard for the company to argue they didn’t do anything.
If you go in, get your oil changed, and the next week your engine stops working, it’s not hard to identify the culprit.
We’ve seen a lot of oil change companies in our practice that aren’t careful. Sometimes even the biggest ones with the biggest brand names will destroy people’s cars. You wouldn’t believe how – just as an example, sometimes the mechanics will drain the oil, but forget to put new oil in the car. So a client is driving their car around with literally no oil inside it. And pretty soon, they don’t have much of an engine left.
We’ll see cases where the mechanics forget all kinds of things or do basic things wrong during an oil change.
There are tons of online complaints about Take 5, so if you’ve had a bad experience with them, you wouldn’t be the only one saying you have. A number of people are reporting to the Better Business Bureau that, for example, when they went to Take 5 their oil pan wasn’t put back on correctly so the oil all leaked out.
First of all, take pictures and video. Save all the evidence you have. Pictures can be one of the best forms of evidence for your lawyer. This is especially true because while you may not know it, your phone will store information in the photo about the date it was taken. So they can be incredibly helpful when proving the exact time you knew your car had damage.
Keep all the documents you have relating to your oil change.
Depending on your state’s law, for some legal claims you may be required to offer Take 5 a chance to fix the car. That’s something we’d only be able to tell you specifically based on your state, though.
In any oil change case, we may want to have an expert witness who’s a mechanic take a look at your car if we take you on as a client. They’ll take photos too, but it’s good to have as much proof as you can about what happened.
It’s hard to say with any lawsuit. In our experience many oil change companies will try to blame the customer for any damage however they can. Many of them routinely point the finger at the customer no matter what. They don’t like the idea of paying for a person’s entire car, even if they’re the ones responsible for totaling it.
But we’ve had a lot of success with these kinds of cases because for many people, the last person to work on the car was the oil change company, and the damage starts happening relatively soon after they drive away. Our lawyers are experienced with various kinds of lawsuits over motor vehicle issues in general, and if a company you trusted damages your car through negligence, we think they should have to compensate you.
If you want us to look at your situation Click Here to Submit Your Claim.