Yesterday I spoke to Club member Fiona following her visit to a manufacturer approved Nissan repairer in the Midlands last week. I won’t mention their name at this stage in case they can put matters right here, but if they don’t (and I have my doubts), I will add it later.
The offending garage in question isn’t a member of our FOXY Choice network but they are signed up to the Motor Codes scheme so we have referred her to them for advice.
The car we’re discussing is an 02 reg Nissan Primera called Bee. Whilst it is undoubtedly an elderly car it has never failed an MOT and Fiona has never bought other than Nissan since passing her driving test. In short she loves and cares for this car.
FOXY’s recommended garage for members is a dealership some way across town for Fiona so we understand why she opted for a nearer but Nissan-approved independent repairer on this occasion to diagnose a mysterious light on Bee’s dashboard.
This garage identified the fault as a dodgy sensor and quoted £266 to replace and rectify the matter, all in. With the benefit of hindsight, we’d say this was on the expensive side but we weren’t involved then. The problem is that this didn’t fix the dashboard light so the work would appear to have been done to no avail.
The verdict? “We think it may be the cambelt now; this will take the bill over £1000…” their technician said. Which would have exceeded the likely value of Bee of course…
But he wasn’t at all nice about this, made Fiona feel the car was too old to be worth bothering with, nobody apologised to her and the final straw was when he suggested it’d be best to explain this to her husband – as if her ‘pretty little head’ couldn’t take all this in.
Needless to say, Fiona’s husband wasn’t overly sympathetic about this and was quick to point out that they had failed to diagnose the problem correctly so why was there a bill? An impasse was reached and even the Manager seemed unable to come up with a solution of any sort.
It’s too soon for us to know where we go from here until Motor Codes gives us their advice.
Certainly Fiona will now go to our ‘female friendly approved’ dealership and we know she’ll be looked after there. But the tricky thing is always when motorists are expected to pay these offending bills before collecting their car, even when the bill seems unreasonable. Perhaps the work wasn’t needed, or done in the first place? Our experience suggests that many garages get paid for unnecessary work in similar and often more expensive situations and then the motorist has no option but to take his or her car elsewhere to remedy the situation, paying again and unsure of how to get the initial party to cough up.
As a result of some to-ing and fro-ing here, possibly at the mention of the second car dealership involvement, we had understood that the Nissan approved repairer had dropped the bill to c£90. That sounded better than the initial £266 of course but it’s still important to remember that the garage hadn’t fixed the problem and may well have replaced a perfectly good car part unnecessarily. In fact the Service Manager said that the new parts were removed, so how can Fiona be sure that the work was ever done?
But when her husband went to collect Bee he was charged £288 so not only did they exceed the original quote by £22 but they also seem to have ignored the fact that this has achieved nothing for the customer. So was the work done or not? The second car dealership should be able to confirm this or otherwise and we’ll be looking at this invoice and breakdown of their charges later.
But the lesson is surely that they could have saved face by being upfront and honest about the problem, realistic about the value of the car they were working on and more knowledgeable overall. Aren’t they supposed to know what’s wrong with a car, not just say ‘we don’t know’ which is how they’ve left things for Fiona. We certainly thought a manufacturer approved repairer should know. But being an authorised Nissan repairer doesn’t count for a lot really when the person representing this brand is rude, patronising and uncaring.
We’re in this for the long haul of course because Fiona is a member. If we don’t get the right outcome for her in a reasonable period of time we’ll be spreading the word about this repairer within the Club. Otherwise how else can female motorists single out the best and steer clear of the rest in future. That’s what FOXY is all about.
Watch this space.
FOXY