Poor customer service

After agreeing to have my vehicle’s water bottle replaced at Holloway’s Workshop in Kuils River, I had the worst experience I’ve ever encountered with any workshop. I left my car with them on Monday, 14 April 2025, and was informed that I could collect it on Wednesday, 16 April 2025 after the job was supposedly completed. However, things took a sharp turn for the worse as soon as I left the workshop. My vehicle began misfiring immediately. I called the workshop right away and was told the owner would get back to me. An hour and a half later, I received a call where the owner bluntly informed me that my engine was busy failing. I was shocked, to say the least. I wrote to them that same evening to express my deep dissatisfaction. I stated very clearly that if there were any suspicions of engine failure, they should have not gone ahead with the repair until they had a full understanding of the vehicle’s condition. To add insult to injury, I also discovered the engine cover was missing, and I raised the very valid question: How do you return a vehicle in a worse condition than when it was brought in? The owner then sent me a 3-minute voice note trying to explain that now that the cooling system was working correctly, the engine—due to high mileage—was revealing its “true state” by misfiring. He went on to say the engine was basically finished. This explanation made absolutely no mechanical sense, especially considering my vehicle had just been serviced a few weeks prior with no indication of engine trouble. I pushed back again, expressing how unacceptable this was. In response, I received another voice note claiming that the misfiring was out of their control and that they couldn’t have predicted this outcome after replacing the water bottle. Again—this just did not sit right with me. To get a second opinion, I had the vehicle towed to a reputable national workshop, where the fault was identified in no time: a cracked spark plug. That’s it. A cracked spark plug was causing the misfire—not engine failure, not a cooling system issue— just something that should have been picked up with any basic diagnostic check. This entire experience was not only infuriating but incredibly disappointing. I tried to support a local business, hoping for quality service and some level of professionalism. Instead, I was met with negligence, poor communication, and a total lack of accountability. I will never return to Holloway’s Workshop again, and I strongly advise others to think twice before trusting them with your vehicle. If this is how they treat their customers, especially when something goes wrong, they don’t deserve our support.