According to Wikipedia, AAA has a bad record of supporting measures that harm motorists and car owners.

According to Wikipedia, AAA has a bad record of supporting measures that harm motorists and car owners.

This includes:

• Virginia‘s now-repealed traffic citation tax because of its revenue generation potential.
• The federal 55 mph speed limit.
• Opposing a 70 mph speed limit on Illinois rural freeways even though the roads can safely accommodate that speed.
• Supporting red light cameras.
• Lobbied in favor of speed cameras in Maryland in 2002, several years before they were actually authorized. Provisionally supporting the expansion of speed cameras in Maryland in 2009, and opposing the repeal of speed cameras in Maryland in 2013.
• Lobbied in favor of authorizing speed cameras in Indiana.
• Supporting an increase in the federal gas tax, and supporting gas tax increases at the state level such as in Virginia in 2012.
• Opposing Illinois increasing its rural speed limit from 65 to 70 mph.
• Proposing the creation of a vehicle miles traveled tax in Idaho

It’s always nice to find out that an organization you pay membership dues to every year is lobbying to foist reduced speed limits that rack up more fines from the state, speed trap and red light cameras that were the center of another Illinois bribery and corruption scandal, which increase car accidents but are kept as a license to rip off the public, a federal 55 mph speed limit that existed in my lifetime that nobody paid attention to and went mostly unenforced in many states because even the cops thought it was so stupid, and billing people a VMT tax on top of the gas tax on top of the registration fees.

AAA is a menace.

I blogged yesterday about how their AAA Car Care Plus shops are an absolute scam that tricks people who use roadside claims into getting a tow down there and then rips them off even after a “20%” member discount.

You may as well just go to the dealer. At least they’re familiar with your vehicle and not a “jack of all trades, master of none” that service “all makes, all models”.

Don’t get me wrong, independent mechanics can be great and they can save you a lot of money, and even some of the chain shops like Car-X can be totally decent, but with AAA Car Care Plus you get the worst of both worlds. Insane dealer prices, and random parts on your car put on by a guy who is not an expert on your car’s brand.

The fact that AAA lobbies against motorist rights and for unconstitutional and corrupt traffic camera schemes and ridiculously low speed limits that nobody pays attention to is like finding out your donations to Planned Parenthood are actually funding Female Genital Mutilation (and as far as I know, THAT isn’t happening, but AAA is the car owner’s version of that).

If Sprint ever stops paying for my AAA, which I only use for roadside, and they may soon now that T-Mobile owns them, I’m going to find some other roadside plan.

Although I hesitate to use my car insurance because claims end up on your CLUE report as an excuse to jack up your insurance rates.

The man from GEICO was trying to sell me their roadside plan on the Buick, and AGAIN when I added the Impala to my policy, and I keep saying “No. I have AAA because if I ever use your roadside, you’ll turn around and put it in CLUE and then rip me off at my next policy renewal, which insurance companies always do anyway and then say ‘Well, things are just getting more expensive out there!’, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give them another excuse for doing it.”.

AAA doesn’t support any of my values, and frankly if I wasn’t getting it for free I wouldn’t be a member. I’ve had faster roadside assistance from buying a set of cheap tires at PEP BOYS.

AAA is sliding fast. It takes them ~5 hours to respond to a roadside call and they want to tow you to their overpriced repair shops.

AAA, or the American Automobile Association, has been around for a while.

I’m a member. Like most members, I’m mostly a member because of the roadside assistance plan. They can help you out with jump starts, lockouts, out of gas, and towing. If you have a dead car battery, they can just bring it out to where you broke down and sell it to you there and install it.

But they have prioritized keeping their costs down over quality of service, and this has led to a very low priority on the list of service calls to their partners.

They’ve also gotten into the car repair industry with a chain of their own car repair shops called “AAA Car Care Plus”. I made the mistake of letting them tow me to one a few years back when I was having trouble with the shift interlock on my Crown Victoria and couldn’t get it to shift out of park when I was in Skokie, Illinois.

They said if I got a repair done there I would save like 20% as a AAA member. What they didn’t mention, of course, is that they have like, fake high repair prices for non-members and even after the member discount, you’re paying more than if you had them tow you to a dealership.

They have clean repair shops and most of the reviews are not complaining about quality of repairs (although some are), but the price for the repair work done is extremely high. If you leave a review, like I did, you’ll get a response that says basically “We’re sorry you feel that way. You could have gone somewhere else.”.

So I do. I keep going to Car-X. There is a AAA Car Care Plus in Vernon Hills, Illinois, but I would never drive over there and pay more than I would at a Buick dealership!

Now, there have been times when I had a mechanical issue with my car and I happened to break down and coast into a Midas parking lot and since I was there anyway I had them push it into the service bay and see what was going on. But, when I have a choice, I usually end up going to Car-X in Waukegan because I know the people that work there and they don’t jack me around and waste my time with prices that came out of god only knows what kind of repair book, and they don’t charge $250-300 per labor hour like AAA Car Care Plus does and then give you fake discounts. Hell, the Chevy dealer “only” charges $175 per labor hour.

The more modern the car is, the higher the prices are going. During my brief time with the 2018 KIA Soul+ I had to take it in for warranty repair and they told me their hourly rate at Grossinger KIA (Now KIA of Lincolnwood, Illinois) was $450 per labor hour.

You really must shop around. But if you get a tow to AAA Car Care Plus, it’ll basically work out like this:

Then you’ll probably pay them to diagnose it and feel trapped, because the diagnostic fee is already an hour of labor and you don’t “get it back” unless you commit to having the repair done there.

So AAA is basically running an operation of really salty repair shops that rip off motorists and even their own members.

Fortunately, I can have them tow the car anywhere and when the latest incident happened, with the Impala, a few months ago, and the guy asked if I wanted a “discount” at AAA Car Care Plus, I laughed and said “Not really much of a discount when they want 33% more than Chevy or Ford and twice as much as Car-X. Take me to Car-X.

AAA has a ton of “discounts” but they’re not on anything worth buying. You can go to one of those shitty overpriced eyeglass places with $1,000 a pair glasses and “save 30%”, but I just order my glasses on EyeBuyDirect and never pay more than about $70 or $80 a pair and they even have transitions lenses and everything.

Or 10% at Denny’s. I’ve used that a couple times I guess.

There’s just not much of a reason to be a member except the roadside service, and the only reason I accept that the roadside service is getting worse is because if you buy roadside from your auto insurance company, then use it, it counts as an at-fault claim in your CLUE report, and it jacks up your car insurance rates next time you renew or change companies.

AAA also sells car insurance. You have to be a member to buy their car insurance, and they just sell policies that are re-insured by someone else, so they’re working on commission and don’t even give you really good quotes that would be worth becoming a member for.

They also have a “car buying service” which allegedly helps you find discounts when car shopping, but then mostly just tries handing you over to freaking Carvana ($15,000 for an $8,000 car why not?).

AAA is clearly not operating as a “motor club” anymore. This is exactly what you’d expect out of any corporation, really. They want to soak you for as much money as possible.

They do lobbying work, but a lot of that lobbying work hurts motorists in the end too. Studies have shown that when AAA lobbied for more lanes on freeways, it didn’t solve congestion problems, it induced more demand. Then the states had even more pavement that it wouldn’t fix later, causing more traffic accidents.

Meanwhile, had that money been invested into commuter rail and better bus schedules, it would have gotten drivers out of gridlock traffic and actually eased rush hour.

To me, AAA is clearly a corrupt organization that is hurting the motorists who pay membership dues.

T-Mobile Google Play problems: Part 3

This evening I called T-Mobile support and eventually got fielded around to someone who knows what’s going on.

He confirmed that the Google Play problems are related to their tower upgrades and shutting down the last of the Sprint network.

Internally, T-Mobile uses a VPN to route certain traffic, including the Play Store, even if you’re not using one of their devices, and something in that setup got messed up. They said they are aware of it and it should eventually go away, but to “keep using the VPN app” to get Google Play to work until it’s fixed.

By using NordVPN, it forces it to tunnel over the internet instead of internally at T-Mobile, through NordVPN’s server, and reach the Google Play store over the Internet, through NordVPN.

While he had me on the phone, he found me a cheaper T-Mobile plan than my Sprint account which they don’t advertise. They have a plan for senior citizens and we agreed that I was over 55 😉 and now my bill for the month should go down by about 30% vs. what I was paying for my spouse and I on the legacy Sprint plans.

To save the $445 a year on the phone bill, I had to give up a Hulu with commercials plan I didn’t even use, and a AAA membership worth about $70. Sprint just made my latest payment, so there’s no AAA bill due until next year.

It’s nice to know that something’s going down, because it sure isn’t the groceries and gas.

Edit: Here’s a quote from a customer who said he finally found someone who knew how to fix it.

“I was having the same problem and spent hours on the phone with a 2 different tech support people at T-Mobile. The second guy I spoke to tonight seems to have fixed the issue. He used a program called Grand Central and said he ran through a process that “cancelled my location and updated network features”. I don’t know what that means exactly but it worked. If you talk to T-Mo tech support, ask them to do this same process. Good luck!”

–Jack Monkey (T-Mobile Forume)