I chose to do business with Ward Service based on their location in Monrovia and the good reviews. They have a person to drive you home or pick you up so I figured I'd give them a try.

As a mechanic's daughter, I was very impressed with the explanations they gave of the service details on my car. I dealt with Jim Ward who gave me straightforward and honest answers. I came in with a laundry list of items, and rather than seeing dollar signs, they prioritized which items jeopardized safety and which were less important. This allowed me to choose what repairs to do after I knew the pricing. In fact, his first question was if I wanted to trash the car instead of fix it, which would mean he wouldn't get any money from me at all.

I had heard lots of noise when turning, and was missing both boots. After talking with my dad on the phone, I asked Jim to replace both axles, because evidently the labor to replace a boot is about the same to replace an axle, and the CV joint noise was coming from one or both axles. Jim mentioned that in his experience, generally just the curbside CV joints go bad, so he'd replace that one and only check the other one. If it were bad, he would replace both; otherwise he would save me money on the parts and just replace the boot. He checked it out and decided it was ok, and replaced only one axle and one boot.

When they hand you the bill, they go through each item and explain what the problem was, what they found wrong, and how they fixed it. After I got the car back I still heard CV joint noise, although a bit quieter. The other repairs worked great. The day after I got the car back, they called to see if I was happy with the service! Wow. I mentioned I could still hear the clicking sound. He took it for a test drive and looked at it, confirmed the CV joint was bad since I had paid for the boot labor, he didn't charge labor for replacing the axle! While he was installing the new axle, he also noticed that my brake pad was installed wrong, and that a one spring aligning it was broken with another missing, and fixed that for free too. I am planning to be a return customer and recommend Ward’s to everyone I know. –Valued Customer Review.