My husband and I just bought a new 2015 5.0 GT Premium PP manual. Great car, love it to death. Well it was in an accident. We live in Minnesota, it’s a cold state and the PP tires are not rated for cold weather. So much so that they get no traction at 40 degrees even on a sunny clear day fresh out of the driveway. Spun out, hit a curb, lesson learned. The damage is to the driver side and needed; both rims, tires, rear knuckle, wheel hubs, wheel bearings, and shock absorbers.. Protip - leave traction control off, and play with the throttle, don’t brake when in a slide.

We were on vacation so we paid the towing company a hefty fee to get the car towed to its home dealership Cornerstone Ford in Elk River Minnesota. At this point I will mention that we have a Blackvue 650 front/rear dash cam. The car takes about a month to get repaired and when we get it back we notice a fierce pull towards the driver’s side on the car. My husband downloads the dash cam footage to our computer and then takes back to the dealership. The dealership seems stumped how this could have happened and tells my husband to bring it back a little later so they can get him a rental. He brings the car back a few days later, they give him a rental everything seem good. Then we get a call. Apparently the wear on the passenger tires versus the newly replaced driver’s tires is enough that the car need all new tires. They tell us to open a new insurance claim so they can get us new tires.

My husband doesn’t think he should have to pay for an insurance claim, and it is at this point we review the dash cam footage looking for test drive footage. The only footage we can find is of a tech ‘test driving’, while on the phone whipping the car around the dirt in the parking lot. We raise our concerns with the service department of the dealership and he agrees to meet with us and do a test drive with us to find the problem. We go out on the test drive but by now the car has magically fixed it’s pulling problem but the pull is still slightly there. It’s less predictable now but the service manager goes on about road crown and how it is causing our problems. He agrees to a free alignment at a later date because at this point we are already late for a trip we’ve been planning to take for a year.

We get home and start preparing for our trip. My husband, thinking over how the car magically fixed its self, came up with the idea of them swapping the back tires. He checked the tires. They were definitely switched. Angered they would pull a fast one on him like that and not be upfront about it, he goes to the dash cam and downloads the footage. What we find pretty much right away is two techs getting into our car, pulling it out, then activating line lock and proceeding to do not one but 2 burnouts. They even mentioned the camera was recording..

He calls the shop service manager, I call the customer service manager and we both demand to know why they are doing burnout in our car. They don’t have any answers and tell us they’ll get back to us when they know more. In the meantime my husband and I need to go and we head off on our trip both fuming but trusting this can be resolved.

We arrive home a few days later and I’m more than ready to review the logs on the dash cam. I go through them find out the first ‘test drive’ they did when the car was first in the shop was on 3/30. The parts to repair our car we were told came in on 4/20. They were whipping the car around while it had all that damage on it. I continue looking, next set of files still on 3/30 are of the tech pulling into the shop and then sitting in the car for about 15 minutes. I listen to the audio. The tech bad mouths us for getting a car that is ‘too much for us’ and that we are ‘****ing bad drivers’ There is more colorful language than that but I’ll spare you the details. I’m furious now. I go to look at the footage of the car after it was taken in the second time. The tech apparently doesn’t know how to drive along with doing burnouts as he stalls the car, gets on it aggressively, doesn’t use a turn signal half the time, rolling stops, and he is speeding most of the time he is in the car.

I alert my husband to this, he checks the paper work. On both invoices they list test drives, but the mileage in and the mileage out are the exact same. 1009 the first time 1219 the second time. On the second invoice not once does it mention the tire swap or the burnouts, just has on it ‘work performed by house tech.’

It takes a while, but the dealership finally gets back to us. Apparently activating line lock and doing a burnout as well as skidding the car while broken are diagnostic tests. After hearing that, I pick my jaw up and then call other dealerships in the area just to find out about the burnout. I managed to get ahold of four, each said the same thing, that ‘doing a burnout is not a diagnostic test.’ I then get ahold of ford itself. Give them a basic summery of my problems and ask them if burnout is diagnostic test on a Mustang. We get a call back and they tell us. 'It's a dealership problem and they can't do anything to help us.' Basically a dealership can use what ever tools they feel is required to diagnose a car. They also told us the dealership did the burnout on dirt to limit the damage to the tires.

TL : DR

Now I come to you to confirm what I already feel I know: Can anyone think of a reason to do a burnout on a Mustang with alignment issues? Or a reason to whip it when it’s heavily damaged?

The dealer said the burnout was to test the limited slip differential and the skidding was to check traction control.

Here are some of the videos of what they did:

Burnout Back camera view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ap4MfllD4q8 Burnout front camera view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNjP8zfCsTo

Test drive part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5ryqfTnjVY Test drive part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDeGv7M7tPk