Cottman Transmission Ctr

The owner & manager, Ryan, is rude, incompetent & has convinced me to never use any Cottman again. My husband & I had a transmission rebuilt for $2000. When it was put back into the vehicle, something was still wrong. It kept popping out of gear. Cottman took the transmission out to trouble shoot & put a clutch master cylinder in. Once they'd done that Ryan called my husband & told him they'd put the transmission back in for $325. My husband told him to go ahead & put it in. One hour later Ryan called him back & said that they would NOT put it back in because "his guy" didn't want to touch it. My husband called me & was furious, so I called Ryan & told him that this was unexceptable & that he'd already quoted us a price to put it back in & we'd agreed to it. He proceeded to try to yell over me as I was talking. End result was that we actually had to have a tow truck pick up the vehicle with no transmission in it & bring it to our own competent mechanic. I strongly warn anyone to never use any Cottman so that no one ever has to go through this horrible experience.

When my son's 2001 Honda Civic developed transmission problems we had it towed to Cottman's on Chef Hwy. Later that afternoon we were called by the shop and told that the cost for a diagnostic would be $325 (all that electronics in the car, they explained) and the repair would be starting at $1600.00, which seemed odd to me. How would they know that without having done the diagnostics? I called another shop (Angelo's) who informed me that the cost of the diagnostic would run me $75.00. When I arrived at Cottman's to get my son's car (we were having it towed to Angelo's) I ran into difficulty. The shop technician would not accept my payment (for the tow charges) via credit card (a number of which they had posted on their shop window as accepting), claiming that his system was down. He said he couldn't make a hard copy transaction either. But in the ensuing argument that followed he said he wasn't going to take the credit card so that I could "stop payment" on the charge later. IN other words, he could've but he wouldn't.Those actions (as well as other practices revealed by the second shop owner) confirmed my suspicions about this shop. Take my word for it, stay away from these guys!