A man took his Mercedes for a service and left the dashcam on | Hacker News Reader

A man took his Mercedes for a service and left the dashcam on

inc.com

53 pointsnimbu30 comments

Firstly, this is very unprofessional and not on-par with the price tag on those things.

Secondly, the click-baity title above the article is also very unprofessional.

At my local Mercedes garage in the UK they record the service on video for you and give you a copy.

This appears to be prevalent worldwide.

A while back there was a similar event: somebody fitted a camera in his car before sending it for service in Bangalore, India. The car was returned after a "wash". (Source: Busted: Maruti Baleno sent for service, gets only a car wash and nothing else – Owner had a camera installed [0])

[0] https://www.rushlane.com/maruti-baleno-service-fake-12252877...

service stations unfortunately deserve their bad reputations. they're routinely the subject of undercover news segments, and seem to have little disincentive against being dishonest to make an extra buck. i was gouged myself recently and it still stings (https://yelp.com/biz/phils-automotive-big-bear-lake if you're curious).

Did this occur in 2015 but is just published in 2018? Why did the recorder of this video sit on it for so long?

  > As for Sheikhan, you might be wondering why his video is emerging only now.

"My lawyers also told me not to share the video anywhere until we hear back from Mercedes because if we share the video there's not much to negotiate so I held onto the video and then after two years when I realize they are not replying or even interested I just decided to post it to raise awareness,"

I laughed at "raise awareness", seems like more of a "fuck you".

Or maybe he tried to bully or blackmail Mercedes into something that he did not get.

I wish I had the power to bully giant multinationals.

If I remember correctly, he mentions in the course of the video that the time is correct but the date is not.

Not sure why I was downvoted, at 1:27 it says that the date stamp is incorrect.

I saw this on YouTube last week.

I don't get it. Isn't driving the car to make sure it's fixed part of their job?

I wasn't aware buying ice-cream was ever part of a mechanical service.

So this is on HN, because ____???

You know, this is the first time I’ve read that comment that I agree with it.

Obviously the astronomically high Benz ownership ratio on HN

It would be interesting to see a survey what wheels the HN audience rides.

I believe it will be bi-modal between luxury cars and no car at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

Sometimes, I wish we could just downvote it. I feel like flagging everything in 'new' just creates spam for the mods.

because it is a news aggregator where people vote to decide what is interesting and what is not.

Would you have made the same comment if the make of the car was not mentioned? Or if it was a Tesla?

It's a somewhat interesting story, discussions about what's going on behind the scenes in car repair shops hardly feel that out of place on HN.

It's indeed somewhat interesting. The casual talk of the employees were like it came from a Tarantino movie.

I still don't get why it clicks with this audience other than there's some social justice to be served and it's about a luxury car brand.

Or maybe it's because it's a cool "lifehack" to use surveillance to your benefit finally.

So this is on HN, because ...it was voted as interesting by enough users. People have a wide variety of interests. I for one, skip most stories on front page, but don't question why they're on HN

So basically a testing in production, we never do it, right?

More like mining bitcoin on graphics cards that come in for testing, without actually looking at what the problem was.

Personal gratification/gain over the needs of the customer..

Eh. Not much of a smoking gun. On balance, I'd say the owner of the car sinned more than the service people for illegally recording them when they had a reasonable expectation of privacy. It was unprofessional of them to take the car through a drive-thru, but other than that, I wouldn't characterize the road test as a "joy ride." Ditto with "blasting" the music. They turned the music on. The editorializing here is a little over the top. And my understanding (I could be wrong) of auto service is that they charge standard amounts for known service, regardless of how long it takes. If, for instance, the job is to replace a particular hose or gasket, they look that up in a book which says bill this much for this job and that's what they bill.

How about the bit where they drive over the kerb at 50km/h, cracking a wheel rim?

Okay, I missed this the first time through, but went back and looked. Sure enough, around 6:36 there's a caption that reads "Drove over sharp curb at 50km/h and resulted in cracked rim when I picked the car up."

But ... this really strikes me as yet more editorializing. If you look at the "sharp curb," rather than taking the text at face value, it looks like a perfectly normal driveway entrance, and 50km/h (30mph) might be a little fast but not outrageous. Actually, if you look closer, the speed reduces to 40km/h (24mph) before it hits the "curb." There's a small jolt, but without the caption I wouldn't even notice it in the video. I have a hard time believing that's enough to crack a wheel rim. But who knows? Maybe you're right.

I think the technician ran the curb on the left side when cornering. You can see the camera shake significantly.

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