My wife has only covered 38,000 miles since she bought the car new from a main agent and until last year has had it serviced by them. She has had few problems with the car and has been very pleased on the whole. She did have a problem with the garage when they phoned up during one service to say that the pollen filter cover had broken and wanted her to pay an exorbitant amount for a new cover. She managed to convince them that it was they who had broken it rather than a case of spontaneous breakage. What the garage did was to lift the corner of the cover to get at the pollen filter rather than remove the windscreen wiper, two phillips screws and then break the seal with the windscreen before removing the filter. Reassembly is in the reverse order. If they dont do it right they will get away with it a few times but will eventually break all the clips. Ford must price for the filter to be changed correctly but the garages cheat and charge the customer for the full job. This is something that the layman can see. It makes you wonder how many other jobs are fudged. I have had a cursory look around some workshops and do not remember seeing many torque wrenches hanging around, although the Haynes workshop manuals show what torque each nut should be tightened to. Just one other point. Recently the car started to run very badly and the engine management light started to glow. The local garage found it was the coil pack, which apparently is a common fault with these cars. A new coil pack ?‚?£51 plus fitting ?‚?£55 later the car was up and running again but three months later the problem returned and I thought I would have it repaired under guarantee however this time the fault was due to faulty spark plugs. This time the bill came to ?‚?£70, 18 for the plugs and 51 to find out it was the plugs! I really dont know what the moral is to this story except perhaps to beware of faulty coil packs and keep your plugs clean. And finally I would like say something nice about Autoglass in Kingston upon Thames. Last week my wife was horrified to find that the front passenger well was flooded after a rainy night. I suspected that the rubber seals around the windscreen needed masticking and so I contacted the experts. They told me that the problem was with the pollen filter cover not being sealed correctly! Anyhow they agreed to have a look at it for me and as it happened I had a chip that needed repairing so I was able to get the two fixed at the same time. The technician at Autoglass, Adrian Watson, resealed the cover and wouldnt even accept a tip for his trouble, which has never happened to me before! So if you are in Surrey and you have windscreen problems call for Adrian (He might even give you a free Autoglass mug!) |
