Audi mechanic takes owner's S4 home for the weekend

Wed, 13 Aug 2014

When you bring your car to a dealer, you expect a technician to take it out for a spin, just to make sure there aren't any noises, rattles or other behavior that you may have missed. Maybe they run a few miles along a predetermined test route or take a quick run down the highway. You do not, however, expect a tech to abscond with you vehicle for a full weekend

That is just what happened to Chris Jackson, though, an Audi S4 owner in Calgary. His car was taken to Glenmore Audi – as mandated in his lease agreement – due to an issue with the navigation system. After realizing he'd left something in the car, he swung by the dealer on Saturday to pick it up, only to discover the car wasn't on the dealer's lot.

Naturally, he approached the dealer about the missing sedan.

"And the dealer's response was, 'It's okay, just go home, your car's fine, it's probably just somewhere on the lot. We can't find it.'"

According to Jackson, who spoke to the CBC, he lapped the dealership lot three times looking for the Ibis White S4. After two-and-a-half hours of fighting with the dealership and a call to the Mounties, the dealer finally started reaching out to its mechanics.

"The only way that they had actually even decided that they were going to call these guys was that I'd called the police and said, 'My car's missing, the dealer doesn't know where it is. I don't know where it is, that's a stolen car,'" Jackson said.

According to the owner of Glenmore Audi, the tech took the car to test the nav system over an extended period, but that still isn't sitting well with Jackson.

"The police officer we spoke with said I've never heard of anything like this before, it's clearly ethically wrong," Jackson said. Jackson and his wife, Angela, told the CBC that the tech put about 500 kilometers on the car (about 310 miles) over the weekend.

What do you think? Is this just a big misunderstanding? Would you be okay with an unknown tech taking your supercharged sports sedan home for a weekend of unsupervised use? We want to hear from you in Comments.

By Brandon Turkus