I have a 2003 VW Golf. In 2008 I had the Cat Con replaced at a local shop unaware of VW 2007 extended warranty on the Cat Con. Now the replacement has failed and VW will not do the replacement (but may reimburse me) which I understand.
Does the service shop have any obligation to notify me of the recall/extended warranty before they did the work? I imagine not but just wondered if anyone had thoughts on this.
Local shop has no obligation.
Good luck with reimbursement. Typically if this is an extra warranty outside of norm they will cover the repair if done outside of dealer and out of pocket.
Not only does the local shop have no obligation to inform you of a car mfr’s extended warranty or recall, but there is a very strong possibility that they were not even aware of it.
This type of information goes to dealerships, but I am not aware of car mfrs making private repair facilities part of this type of communication. This is a good example of why it can pay (literally) to check with a dealer’s service department before deciding to have a private repair facility do repairs on a vehicle as new as 5 years old.
If the dealership tells you that there is no coverage for a particular repair, then you should ask for their repair cost estimate and compare that number with one or two estimates from private repair facilities. When there is no warranty coverage, the dealer will typically be more expensive, but–not always!
Your owner’s manual will explain the terms. There is a federal EPA warranty for 7 or 8 years or 80K that includes the cat. The remedy is to take it to the dealer and they will replace it free. There is no way the dealer could look back three years to determine if the cat was actually bad, whether or not an engine condition needed to be corrected first, or whether there was abuse on the original cat. You would need to deal with the warranty on the replacement cat which I doubt would be more than a year.
If the work was done at the dealership while the catalytic converter was still under warranty or if there was a recall on the catalytic converter (no time limitation on recalls) the job should have been done by the dealership free the first time.