part inspection
I don't know for sure what the real cause is in regards to the stealership not being able to stock these parts. All I can tell you is what Kari Dodge told me. They told me that the part was flagged as a star part because there had been other failures and Chrysler knew they had a problem with these parts and were tracking them to determine the cause of the failures. They also said they wouldn't let them stock one because the part had to be inspected before it could be shipped to them. He said he had argued with corporate about this saying that he saw no reason why they couldn't send them one inspected unit to keep in stock so that it wouldn't cause a delay for their customers. He told me he got nowhere with Chrysler with this argument (he also told me that he had no problem with me calling chrysler to complain about this policy myself - - in fact he said if enough customers started calling them about this maybe they'd change their policy {this makes me think that what he was telling me was probably the truth}). This is exactly what I was told by the Dodge dealer. Are they lying and is there something else going on here? I don't know. What I do know is that it puts the burden and the inconvenience on the customer and therefore, whatever the reason, it's a stupid and shortsighted policy. Losing 4 days of my vacation with the added cost of hotel and food and rental car because of this policy was darn near enough to send me to the Ford dealer when I got home to talk to them about a power stroke (I paid cash for my truck so it would not have been a big deal to trade it in). By the time I got home from vacation I had cooled down enough to re-think it. Again, I love the Dodge truck but corporate has got their head up their ***!:-{}