First I want to say that I don't personally know any of the staff or the owner at Crescent, but I have met several of them in the course of using their services over the last many of weeks. It is also important to know that I don't usually take the time to write a review of anything, so this is an exception for me. I was so pleased with the service that I received on three recent occasions, that I went out of my way to let the owner of this small shop know how well his people had performed. He told me that I could help if I would write a review on this site, so here I am. There is a horrible review of their service on this site, so I understand why he asked. Here is why I was so pleased with their service.
To fully appreciate this, you need to know that In my youth I did virtually all of my own auto maintenance including manual transmission overhauls, engine rebuilds, suspension work, even body work. In addition, most of my work life has been centered around mechanical trouble shooting in industrial manufacturing settings. It is important to understand this about me because my happiness with the service at Crescent is about my respect for their diagnostic abilities and my appreciation for their thorough explanations of what they find.
I do not believe that a small shop like Crescent (one that I understand to have been operating in the same place and under the same working ownership for 20+ years) can be completely devoid of integrity one day and then provide the kind of excellent professional service that I have received consistently since I started using them. At every decision point, the Crescent folks have spelled out my options. I had them do a tune up as a starting place to find a problem with my engine running rough. I didn't think the tune up would cure it (although I was hoping it would). They asked me if I wanted to replace the spark plugs for the tune-up. They couldn't know how long it had been since I replaced them, so they asked. In the end, they succeeded where others had failed in locating a faulty sensor was making my car run rough. I also had them do some suspension work for me. Once again, they gave me good detailed options to consider that ranged from a lower cost ""get by safely"" option to a ""make it new"" option. Finally, because of the confidence I was developing in the shop, I took a older friend of mine to them that was feeling trapped in a bad situation. He has an old Plymouth van and his power brakes were not working. He went to the dealer and they told him that they wouldn't work on the brake system at all until they had repaired the malfunctioning diagnostic system that they plug into. That alone could have cost more the the van was worth. We asked Crescent to track down the issue and told them we wanted to stop investing in the search at $200 of labor if they had not found the answer. But once again they did find the answer by tracking down the short in the ABS pump-motor assembly that the dealer wouldn't even begin to look for and they did so for well below the labor limit we had set.
In light of my own experience, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the Skunk 16 report is anything more than a hatchet job on Crescent by an unethical competitor. I simply do not believe it. Crescent is an excellent shop, and I would recommend them to anyone.
Pros: strong diagnostics, especially electrical (rare)
Cons: I haven't experienced a con.
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