When you send your car to an official dealership for repairs, you trust that the technicians are busy working to fix it. But as one woman in Tennessee found out, an employee had driven her Mercedes-Benz C300 out of the dealership and to several locations around Collierville, including one bar. The technician claims that he was just on an “extended test drive,” but a judge wasn’t buying it.
Judge found the employee’s conduct “extreme and outrageous”
In January, Kimberly Porter received a notification from a third-party tracker that her Mercedes was not at the dealership where she had left the car for repairs, according to WREG. A month earlier, Porter had put her car in for service after she filled the car with “bad gas” and found that the Mercedes had “started idling on the interstate.”
To her surprise, the tracker indicated that the C300 was driven to the chain restaurant J. Alexander and then to the sports bar TJ Mulligans. At that point, she drove her loaner vehicle to the bar, found her car in the parking lot, unlocked it with her spare key, and called the police, according to an earlier report.
It was later discovered that one of the dealership’s service technicians, Derrick Nguyen, was responsible for the joyride. He was arrested by Memphis Police and charged with theft of property.
Porter sued both Nguyen and the dealership, with the lawsuit having gone to trial in July. The defendants said that Porter had given her permission for the vehicle to be used for an extended test drive.
However, Judge Lynn Cobb was not convinced by the excuse. In court documents, the judge said that customers expect that their vehicles will be “kept in local proximity to the dealership or shop” while they are being repaired and found that the technician’s conduct “extreme and outrageous.”
“Little do they suspect that their vehicle would be taken from the dealership location or used for some personal purpose,” Cobb wrote.
The judge awarded Porter $20,720, which includes $15,000 for punitive damages.
Kevin Snider, the attorney representing Porter, was satisfied by the judgement. He said, “The ruling by Judge Cobb sends a very clear message that consumers will be protected from dealerships and their employees that not only engage in this type of outrageous behavior but then try to justify it and profit by it when they get caught.”
Nguyen still faces a criminal theft charge, which is expected to be resolved in August.
