A man on Cape Cod is dealing with a dashboard disaster after he purchased a new pick-up truck with a faulty check engine light.
Mic Grasso is a mechanic and thought fixing up the old truck would be a dream. But, a missing dashboard light turned that dream into a nightmare.
“It needed a little bit of work it seemed,” he said. “I checked it out. The price was right for what it was.”
So he bought it from the local dealership. But, he said it did not take long for things to go south.
“It starts hiccupping and stalling and smoking,” Grasso said.
His professional experience told him the check engine should be on — but it wasn’t.
So, he started up the truck and took a video to prove there was a serious problem.
“Guess what, there’s no check engine light in this truck. so either, the dealership took it out to be shady, or the people at the dealership got it from someone who took it out to be shady,” Grasso can be heard noting on the video.
The check engine light should come on and then go off every time a vehicle is started.
Now, if that light stays lit, it could spell trouble but in Grasso’s case, there was no light at all.
Grasso said he never thought to pay attention to that little light when he put his key into the ignition because he never thought anyone would take it out.
“Take the dashboard apart and I realize that there is absolutely no light bulb in the gauge cluster,” he said,
Auto safety experts say that dashboard lights can be tricky to deal with.
“They come on for only a certain window of time then they go off and in some cases have to be in a certain sequence and it’s easy to miss,” safety research strategist Sean Kane said.
Grasso contacted the dealer and said they stopped taking his calls.
“They were very off-put and I could tell they were nervous,” he said.
7NEWS reached out to the dealer as well and were told:
“We tried to work with the buyer, but the customer is unreasonable.”
The truck has too many miles to qualify for the state’s lemon law which protects consumers from defective products.
Grasso has taken his problem to the Attorney General’s Officer to try and get some of his money back.
“I have a 6,000-pound paperweight at this point,” he said.
Experts say that before purchasing a used vehicle, buyers should take it to a qualified mechanic and have them scan the car’s onboard computer.
“It’s not terribly expensive to do and it can save you a lot of heartache down the road,” Kane said.