Champion Car Wash

On Aug 30,2018 our daughter took her 3 year old vehicle to the Champion car wash on Franklin Pike. Before she drove into the automatic car wash, she overheard a woman telling the employee that the machine hit her car really hard and loud and scared her and her kid(s) pretty good. The employee walked into the car wash, looked up at the equipment, then waived our daughter in. Before driving off the woman said, "good luck in there!" to our daughter. Our daughter then entered the car wash and the large spinning brush on the driver's side was cleaning the hood when the bottom of her windshield started cracking. The apparatus continued crushing the windshield and denting the hood and roof as she squirmed over to the passenger side seat in fear. After 20 or so seconds of terror with the windshield caving in towards her, an employee hit the emergency shut off.

Our daughter was very shaken and thankfully only suffered minor scratches and cuts on her legs from all the glass. We called the police, and they took a report to include a statement made by the operations manager that the car wash would pay for the damages. It has now been over 2 weeks and the owner Tim Jones has not, and apparently will not, return the calls to our insurance company. He also never returned our call when the operations manager assured us he would have the owner call us. The owner's mail box on his phone has been full since this incident happened, and based on other reviews, it has apparently been full for a very long time.

The owner has never called us or our daughter to check on her or to apologize and try to assist in a smooth resolution, or even offer a refund for the car wash (minor but it's the principle). The operations manager takes the messages for Tim when we or our insurance calls the car wash and says he will have Tim call them/us back. Tim just continues to ignore us all. This was a severe mechanical failure that, in my opinion, reveals their negligence of their equipment. They even had a customer tell them something was wrong and instead of fully investigating her concerns, they sent our daughter into the car wash. If we could give them a zero rating, we would based primarily on how they have handled this incident.

Thankfully our daughter was not seriously injured. If they had not shut off the machine fast enough, just imagine what could have happened? Anyone using this car wash needs to be aware of this incident and also be aware of how they treat a customer who paid a lousy $6 for this experience and incurred several thousand dollars of damage to our car.

I'm happy to add photos but this site won't accept jpeg formatting.