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Mechanic Takes Customer's S4 Home for the Weekend in Canada, Outrage Follows

When you bring your brand new Audi S4 to the same authorized dealership that you bought it from, you pretty much expect it will receive the same lavish attention as you got when you payed $70,000 for it. What you don't expect is that the mechanic will like it so much that he'll decide to spend the whole weekend revving its supercharged V6 engine.
Audi A4 1 photo
Photo: Audi
It happened in Canada, this week to a guy by the name Chris Jackson. After delivering his white S4 sedan to Audi Calgary for a new windshield and a check of the GPS system, he realized that he forgot something important in it.

But to his surprise, the dealership couldn't find it and told him "It’s OK, just go home, your car’s fine, it’s probably just somewhere on the lot. We can’t find it," according to CBC Canada.

Two and a half hours of arguing with the dealership staff and a call to the police later, the S4 was revealed to be in the possession of one of the mechanics employed there, who had taken it home for the weekend.

The story went viral on the internet, sparking outrage. It even forced Glenmore Audi to make an official statement of apology on its Facebook page earlier today: "Glenmore Audi would like to formally acknowledge and take full responsibility for our mistake while diagnosing service on our customers vehicle. An error was made in not-communicating the plan to the customer. We sincerely apologize for this mistake."

The owner of the car was told the exact same thing and promised it wouldn't happen again. But we'd understand if this weren't enough for him and he would seek legal action. After all, how could you possibly inform your customer that a mechanic was going to use his car over the weekend and drive it for 500 kilometers, which might take take about 10 hours, affectively detracting from its resale value.

Without a signed document, we cannot see this as anything other than an illegal joyride of somebody else's prized sports sedan. Even if we're talking about a simple mechanical check, it's still unsupervised, non legally-bound work being carried out.

And why didn't the employees know where the car was in the first place if this was a routine check? Illegal? Maybe. Morally wrong? For sure!
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About the author: Mihnea Radu
Mihnea Radu profile photo

Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida.
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