The Agony of Mexican Warranty Maintenance

Getting our car serviced is an exercise in humility.

This isn’t the car we bought, but how awesome would that have been?

When Andrea and I started looking for a car, we knew we wanted an SUV, something tall enough to navigate Mexico’s many dirt roads and rutted streets and with enough passenger space and storage room that we wouldn’t feel cramped. While I had visions of long and enjoyable roadtrips ending with the storage portion of the car being filled with glass carboys of mezcal and local pottery, we focused on the immediately practical, and after not too much searching, settled on a mid-size Nissan SUV painted a lustrous metallic orange, a color I’d always loved. It wasn’t hard to picture myself and Andrea cruising the Oaxacan countryside, cresting mountain passes and traversing through jungle and pine forest. But in the end, what truly attracted us was the low mileage and the car’s robust warranty.

Most vehicles in Oaxaca are sold from one person to another without the use of an intermediary like a dealership. This is because Mexico is a country that both embraces and suffers from bureaucracy, one of only two in the world where there’s an entire government-authorized profession dedicated solely to navigating (and circumventing) interactions with government authorities. Buying and registering a car is famous for being difficult in Mexico, which any reasonable person tries to avoid drawing the attention of. But, not being citizens and having a poor command of Spanish, we didn’t want to run the risk of purchasing a vehicle that didn’t have a clean title, nor did we have a trusted mechanic we could turn to if our new purchase required some sort of overhaul. We needed a car from someone who’d take responsibility if the engine suddenly exploded or if the wheels fell off.

The certainty offered by the dealer, though, is almost outweighed by the misery of going there. Reaching the recently renovated building, with its large plate-glass windows and floors that are perpetually polished to a mirror shine, requires a long trip through a particularly traffic-dense portion of the city’s tangled network of streets, alleys, and avenues. The journey terminates in the blandly commercial neighborhood nicknamed Gringolandia, notable only for its international fast-food restaurants and big-box stores like Sam’s Club and Home Depot.

While we quickly learned to dread the trip to Nissan, the arrival has proven to be worse. The fault lies not with Nissan, but with my Spanish skills. While long ago I learned the basic vocabulary required to describe the workings of a car, being able to accurately convey the minor ills of our SUV to a technician requires a deep repository of technical vocabulary. It doesn’t help that a good mechanic can, right away, see how the workings of one part of a vehicle might impact another, and that a casual description of a routine squeak, clunk, or squeal will invariably lead me into a minefield of rapid-fire Spanish made up mostly of direct and highly specific questions.

This past visit, I was checked in by a short, kind woman with lustrous black hair and round cheeks who told me her name was Jessica. When I described this most recent crop of problems—a roar from the air conditioner like a miniature tempest, a persistent squeak coming from the steering wheel, and an ominous rattle I feared was emanating from the transmission—she asked me exactly when the rattle began, and I found myself at a loss to describe in Spanish how to say it was when the car was in drive.

“Well, it’s when you’re in park, and then you want to drive, so you move the stick…” I stammered, trying to negotiate my Spanish around a term I simply could not figure out. She quickly realized what I was trying to say and nodded, while making a note on a diagram of a car attached to a clipboard.

“I’m very sorry, I don’t know how to say this,” I said in Spanish. “Como se llama?”

“Drive,” she replied crisply, and I had to laugh. The word was the same in Spanish and English.

Other than the surprising fact that they wash and detail our car every time we bring it in for service, the visits are efficient and joyless. The staff are always patient and unfailingly polite, but it’s an impersonal sort of transaction. I’m never going to get to know the mechanic looking at the car’s guts, and if I did, I’m sure they’d come away unimpressed by my inability to articulate why things aren’t quite right with the vehicle. But in Oaxaca, where regularity and consistency are in depressingly short supply, looking foolish in exchange for a car that drives beautifully is worth it.

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