Vent of Hearing

Garages and Cars

I have a car. I bought it when it was a baby, brand new, no previous careful owner. It was a fair price when I bought it, and I knew it would depreciated dreadfully after buying it, but I was in this for the long haul, the whole nine yards. I wasn't going to sell my baby. I didn't want to adopt someone else's baby either. Who knows where it has been, how badly it had been driven, what banks it had been driven away from in high speed chases.

When you do get a new car, and do drive it carefully and controlled, and you get it serviced regularly, you do not expect random things to go wrong with it, yet this seems to par for the course for cars, and garages can get away with murder when it comes to fixing the car for you. I would expect the odd, rare occurrence of a problem, or problems caused by accidents or bad driving.

When you don't have a 'friend in the trade' or know of a good, reputable, cheap garage you are over a barrel when it comes to handing out the dosh. Furthermore, there seems to be no obligation to actually fix the problem. If a garage "fixes" a car and a week later the same problem occurs again, it seems you have no option but to pay again to get it "fixed".

Today I had to take the car to a garage to try and find out why I was having trouble starting it every morning, and why the ignition light was on constantly (typically, it started first time this morning and the light didn't come on). They charged me 30UKP to test the system, discovered a possible cause, but said that it might not fix the problem and they didn't have a required replacement part in stock. The part in question is about 18UKP but my total bill is likely to be over 100UKP once labour and VAT are taken into consideration. And it might not fix the problem (which had gone away) and may not be needed.

(Aside; if I left my car there overnight they could guarantee it being fixed the next day, but if I took it away they couldn't get the part in before Friday. Some sort of 'over-the-barrel' system in place there too.)

Another customer was in at the same time, and had the same test done. They could find nothing wrong, and explained that they had cleaned the spark plugs at bit in the hope that would fix the problem. The charge; 30UKP.

This is just a rant and I should actually be more constructive and find out exactly what the test is, what it involves and why it costs so much. I should also investigate other garages and find out my other options and what can be done, and perhaps expose a corrupt system, but I am neither Anne Robinson or Trevor McDonald and have no wish to become one of their type. So I won't.