I had a service representative tell me that my tires needed to be replaced because the treads were separating from the main body of the tires.
I got a second opinion and was told that there is no evidence of tread separation.
I have driven the car almost 1,000 miles since then with no tire issues.
I will be changing service providers for the car.
I had purchased a Honda Passport many years earlier so no warranty. I began having a problem where the vehicle at a stop light would chug and the speedometer would waver. I also noticed that when the vehicle was in Cruise control the vehicle would drop out of Cruise when the speedometer wavered. This is before the new diagnostic tools we now have.
I took it to the Honda dealer near me, the Service Writer called and said that my speedometer was bad but they had to replace the whole dash board. I told them it was NOT the speedometer but they insisted. I went in, explained why it was not the speedometer but they would not budge. I took the vehicle home, ordered a part from an online Honda Dealer and fixed the problem.
Without being too technical, the speedometer in this vehicle is at the output side of the computer. That makes it essentially a voltmeter. The input to the computer (among other things) is the output of a sensor in the transmission that sends pulses to the computer when the vehicle is running. The computer changes those pulses t oa voltage that goes to that ‘voltmeter’. You see, a little electronics background, a little vehicle understanding and some common sense proved me correct. If the speedometer was jiggling it could have been a loose wire, a bad speedometer and so on. Since the Cruise Control was also effected AND that was an input to the computer, the issue more than likely was the transmission sensor.
Since then I have purchased an OBDII module which is plugged into my vehicles. I have been able t odiagnose and fix most errors myself and if I need a shop to fix it, at least I know what the cause is and an approximate cost.
Lava you are more sophisticated on these issues than the typical consumer.
I am glad you did not get ripped off.
I was never an automobile expert (in college I created a ram air for my Camaro with a vacuum cleaner hose attached to the front grill).
While not specifically a Servie Department story, a friend who owned a small auto parts business and was into tuning up his cars disagreed with a Service Department.
He was trying to adjust the tuning on his vehicle but could not get the idle to slow down. He finally caleld a Service Department who suggested that he check to make sure he had enough water in the radiator. He hung up knowing that this guy was nuts. After many more attepts, he checked the radiator and sure enough, it was low. He added water and the idle came down.
This was when the vehicle computers had just been out a short while and he was not familiar with them. It turns out that if the engine is hot, the computer would (back then) make the engine run faster so that the fan could move more air over the radiator, thus cooling the water and engine and thus the engine would slow down.
At that point, I myself started getting interested in the vehicle computers. Today there are a myriad of sensors and the computers store all sorts of data and some save recent braking, throttle position, speed data and so on. This can be used like a black box in a plane to help determine what happened during a specific event.
I suggest that people investigate OBD readers and perhaps own one to at least explain why their check engine light comes on. This helps determine if the vehicle really needs service right away or not and what might be the causes.
The only time I ever had tread separation on a tire was back in the 70’s when Goodyear made a bias-ply/fabric-belted tire to compete with the Michelin steel-belted radial tire.
The Goodyear belted tread detached in the first 10k miles.