I will try to keep this short.
Some things presented are misleading, and imply Alex to be 100% free of any guilt. By his own admission, he is out to get his moneys worth. So, I suppose its fair for him to slander me and my company. I guess now that he is putting my full name up he will have my address phone number and other personal information up soon too??
On to the tuning......
Care to share what your thoughts of the car were after the tune? How about your impressions of your car with my tune compared to the new cars you went to look at?
What this comes down to is
1) there was a problem with the hardware. It was causing problems as described above. These problems had been noted by other users a few years back when ESL was a new system. I asked Andy about this directly, and was assured that any such problems had been sorted out, and had not surfaced again.
A test board was brought out, and I spent a few days, and many hours testing, tuning, and re-testing with speed stick. No such problems presented themselves. We did an install of this system on 3 other cars with no issues at all. Alex brought his car down, and everything went well. It wasnt until a couple weeks later that Laski came down, and during the tune his car displayed some of the same problems.
I contacted Andy At ESL about this, and I am sure his heart sank. The symptoms were exactly as described from a few years earlier. Arrangements were made, and replacement boards were sent over.
We all know how that went as Alex has posted it up all ready.
During the re-test of the install Alex was explainging how he was planning to sell his car, and buy a Genesis or 270 because he had a new job that meant he didnt need to keep this car. Once everything was done that day, I refunded him $400 of his investment as he drove back home.
The rest of the story comes down to a matter of opinion. Alex is accusing me of being shady, lying and whatever else he wants. I have spent many many hours negotiating and working to get a refund for him. Sent the boards back with overnight shipping (that takes 2 weeks???), and then UPS spent 1 week trying to deliver the package. It kept coming back as undeliverable.
Turns out, there is just over $350 of boarder charges because the UK gov decided that it was insured for $2000, so it must be worth that. I spent another week trying to sort that out, and was getting nothing back from ESL over the shipment. When I finally heard back from him, I contacted UPS to hear that they have abandoned the package.
Currently I have a claim in for the package, which I am not optamstic about ever seeing anything.
I will be the first to agree that Alex should get a refund of some sort. Which I told him was coming. He pressed more, and insisted that he wanted something done right now. At that point I informed him that if he needed a solution right now, that the $400 he has is for the ESL board, and the other $400 is a tuning credit for whenever he wants.
I currently have another customer who is getting a mafless board from ESL. It will not have the same problem, and I am going to edmonton to do the tune for him so there is no more cost to him. Alex could have had the same agreement, but backed out on his promise to purchase. He got the service, which maybe should, or should not be refunded on. I have not seen many mechanics that will refund the cost of labour on an install of anything, why this is different I do not know.
in the end, I had a deffective product from an overseas dealer. And at great expense to myself and ESL we have been working to get working units into the vehicles in question..... along the way Alex backed out. Long after I had spent more than the original $250 profit on making it right. I am not in a position to spend $1000+ on a $250 service with a $550 peice of hardware.
I am not offering the ESL system to anyone at this point. Which is why the other user above noted no reply. I didnt want, and still do not want to offer a product to someone that has questionable build quality. Once the mafless board comes in, and that gets tested, we will see what happens from there. But, I dont want to be taking peoples money for something that I also am not sure about.
Now my biggest problem is setting up my spam filters to stop the emails Alex is sending every 30 minutes.
This is one deal gone bad because of bad judgement, people going back on their word, and tempers getting out of control..... and I am not just talking about Alex, I accept responsability as well.
You guys can make of this what you wish. If I wasnt being blamed for being deceitfull I wouldnt have much problem with the entire explanation. At no point was I ever trying to cover up anything, or hide any truth. The information that was important to Alex has always been handed to him.