Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Groovy Automotive – Another Awesome Austin Legacy

As I had mentioned a few posts back, I had some problems with my car's brakes. Specifically, they didn't work. At all. Well, I got them fixed recently, and just wanted to spread word about another great part about Austin – Groovy Automotive.

Now, Groovy isn't a hold-over from hippy-era Austin. In fact, according to their website, they've only been around since 1993 or something (despite their multi-colored neon sign with the Peace Signs for "o"s), but that doesn't change the fact that they're fantastic. Not only the best auto shop I've been to in Austin, but they are easily the best I've been to anywhere. Cheap. Quick. Trustworthy (they have never tried to fix anything that I didn't explicitly tell them I needed fixed). Courteous. Accommodating. All-in-all, just about the best experience I could expect to have while dealing with one of the shittiest of all errands (god, I hate car troubles).

Really, I just wanted to give Groovy their due as a fantastic mechanic's shop. I can't begin to explain how frustrating I find dealing with car troubles (it doesn't help that I know absolutely nothing about cars), and what a foul mood it puts me in. So to take care of something as serious as brakes that don't work (and they didn't work at all) with so little headache is nothing short of a small miracle.

In the unlikely event that you ever find yourself in Austin with car troubles and don't know where to go, trust me. Go to Groovy.

2 comments:

Cori said...

Sounds like Groovy Automotive is a nice place, but I'm afraid Groovy Lube is their evil twin. I brought in my car for last year's State Inspection and when I came to pick the car up, my driver door could no longer be opened from the outside. The guy on duty at the counter denied all responsibility and said it was that way when I dropped it off, and I was obviously trying to defraud Groovy. I found the girl who pulled my car into the garage in the morning. She took one look at her coworker's face, and slunk off mumbling that she couldn't remember one way or the other. Note that my car is a bright, metallic, mustard-colored hatchback, which she would have had to climb into via the passenger door had the door actually been jammed as they claimed. Somehow, the memory eluded her. This guy on duty refused to tell me when the manager would be in, and every time I called back, or dropped by trying to find the manager, I got this same a-hole. I had my insurance agent call, and the same Groovy employee soundly cussed her out. After a week of having to enter my car from the wrong side, I gave in and got it fixed elsewhere. The cost was well below my deductable, but a big bite into my monthly budget. I've never been able to get that money back, because it's too little money to be worth pursuing through legal means, and my driver window still doesn't track correctly sometimes because the door repair disturbed that internal window mechanism. The Groovy Automotive branch may be way better, but I'll never be able to bring myself to go there. I strongly discourage anyone else from leaving their car at the Lube branch on Guadalupe. I realize every car service place probably has someone with a horror story to contradict every nice thing the rest of their customers have to say. It was probably just this one attendant who was the main trouble. I admit I'm still irrationally furious about the whole incident, after all this time, and I probably should have saved this rant for a blog of my own, but I can't help venting off some of that anger whenever I see the Groovy chain praised.

Scott said...

That's horrible! That's even worse than when I was in high school and I paid $200 to have my "control rods" replaced, only to find out years later there's no such thing as a control rod. Well, in a car at least. Apparently nuclear reactions have them. But seriously, that's terrible.

I've never been to the Groovy on Guadalupe, just the Red River one. Sounds like the Guadalupe one is a big pile of shit. Maybe I am just taken with the endorsement letter from the Butthole Surfers' Gibby Haynes that's on the wall of the Red River Groovy.