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As much as we all want to believe a dealership employee would never go joyriding in our beloved performance vehicle, we all know it does happen. We’ve covered other stories of customer cars getting destroyed by people who work for a dealer, but this one involving an extremely rare 2018 Chevy Camaro ZL1 E Hendrick Edition is more heartbreaking than most.
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The beautiful, limited-production muscle car had a mere 989 miles on the odometer when the owner took it to a local dealer in Darien, Connecticut. Just hours later, it was crashed at high speed on the interstate, reports Automotive News, and the owner is suing the dealership.
In the lawsuit filing, the owner of that Camaro claims it was appraised at a value of $97,000 before he dropped it off at the H & L Chevrolet service department. The owner also claims he expressly told the service advisor nobody was to drive his vehicle off the dealer lot.
What brought him to the dealership was to diagnose why the muscle car wouldn’t start. That apparently was fixed rather rapidly. Then a service advisor, with another employee riding shotgun, allegedly took it out joyriding.
Reportedly, the vehicle was traveling 89 mph on the interstate when it drifted out of the center lane under hard acceleration, veering right and into the guardrail. The resulting damaged totaled the rare muscle car, leaving the owner fuming.
Helping to piece together what happened was the track data recorder, included in the factory, which normally helps owners to analyze and fine-tune their driving on closed circuits. However, in this case it’s being used as evidence in the lawsuit, allegedly proving hard acceleration at high speeds played a factor in the crash.
We personally don’t have a high opinion of dealerships or independent repair shops joyriding in customers’ cars. But we know many in the industry say sometimes what appears to be hot dogging around for fun is techs diagnosing problems or checking the results of their work.
So where does the line sit between responsible and irresponsible behavior?
When it comes to this case, it might be up to the court to decide.
Image via Mark Forti/Facebook Marketplace
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Source Agencies
