Toronto, Ontario — A Toronto woman has alleged a mechanic took her convertible on a 100-kilometre joyride after bringing her car in for a routine oil-change, reported Global News.
Karen Bliss, has gone to Starling Automotive for about 25 years now. So she was a little surprised when she noticed her car had racked up quite a few kilometres.
Bliss initially became suspicious when she noticed “white crud” on the bottom of her vehicle, “as though someone had taken it through a construction site,” Bliss told Global News.
She also noticed some scratches and other marks near the wheels.
After noticing this damage, she remembered a service technician wrote down the vehicle’s odometer reading.
When Bliss first brought in her car it had 79,148 kilometres on the odometer, according to the work order at Starling Automotive. And when she got home it was 79,256 kilometres.
“I did the math … someone took it on a 100-kilometre joyride,” Bliss said.
The shop’s owner, Mike Roth says his employee must have imputed the odometer reading incorrectly.
“It was a clerical error, that was it, it was a clerical error,” Roth said. “We wrote the incorrect mileage down.”
Although Roth’s explanation seems viable, Bliss has some pretty damning evidence herself.
Prior to bringing her vehicle to Starling Automotive, she had taken it to a company in Vaugh, Ont., which is just outside of Toronto to get a few cosmetic enhancements done.
According to the work order at the Vaughan business, the odometer had a reading of 79,114 kilometres.
The trip from the company back to her home was about 27-kilometres-long, which isn’t far off from the initial reading taken by the service technician at Starling Automotive.
Bliss has had to pay several hundreds of dollars to fix the vehicle and Roth has refused to pay for anything.
