Dedric of Stockbridge, GA, writes:
I have a 1999 Mercury Cougar that was purchased in December of 1999. I like the car, but my experience at the dealership service department and the way we were treated after the purchase made me hate even looking at it for a while.

The first problem we had with the dealership is that it was sold to us with one key. The problem with that is this car uses a special key that works with the PATS (Passive AntiTheft System) immobilizer in the car. The key has a small transmitter in it, which makes it cost more that a normal key, and on top of that these keys have to be coded to the PATS system by the dealer if you only have one key. A few days after the sale we asked for a second key to the car.

The first response from the saleman (David Belser) was "We cant do that, those keys cost like $70 a pop, plus programming!", later he told us, "Thats a $50 key", then he told us "Talk to my manager Ken Nestlehutt". We talked to him and he agreed to replace it. (BTW, If I recall correctly, these keys cost about $20 according to a sign in the parts department.)

The car also had a few other minor problems that the dealer aggreed to look at. I took it in and at first they were cooperative. The first two were that a center cap on the wheel was damaged and they put an order in for a new one. Next, a piece of the grill was missing, which they also replaced. They also fixed the seatbelt, which was twisted.

The main problem for me was that BOTH headlamp assemblies have hairline cracks in them. When I showed this to a service rep, his first response was, thats a scratch. I looked at it and touched it, I felt no scratches, but I *did* see quite a few cracks in between the bulges of the assembly. He tried convincing me that someone probably washed it and scratched it, or maybe they took it through an automatic car wash. I asked to speak to a service manager to look at it, and we said, those are scratches after looking at if for about a half a second. They called a technician and another guy who I'massuming was a manager of some sort to look at it. The tech looks at it and immediately says those are cracks, at which time all of the managers look at him and say nothing. He walks off and they still insist that they are scratches and say there is nothing that can be done.

I park the car outside in the sun so it can be viewed better and I get another manager to look at it, because I wasn't leaving until something was done, I feel I should get at least some respect because they didn't seem to like having me around. He looked at it and said, "There is nothing that I can do..." at which time I pointed out another defect in the assembly. Some of the black plastic inside was not finished they way it was supposed to be, it was white.

He then said, "Well, I can replace it because of that, since its a defect, but we wont replace the other one unless it fills up with water". (Which there is a TSB on, these lights had a defect in them that caused them to collect condensation on the inside)

Four months later, I get a replacement headlight. It gets better. This headlight is different from the old one. The old one had a rubber strip between the headlight and the front fascia (bumper). This new one doesnt have that. So now the left light has this strip, and the right doesnt. In my opinion thats unacceptable for a car thats being paid for, you should be happy with something thats costing $300 a month! The service rep commented "Well, you can't really notice it" (he said the same about the cracks) and "I'd be happy with the car, my car is older and I pay probably 2 or 3 times what you probably pay on yours".

To add insult to injury, yesterday my window stopped working, it doesnt roll down anymore. This car only has 22k miles. My old car had over 150k miles and was over 10 years old and the window on it failed once, and that was after about 120k.

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