Mechanics Driving Customer Cars

Nathan

Nathan

Nathan

Soldato
Joined
4 Feb 2003
Posts
5,328
Location
West Midlands
I know it happens all the time, my cousin works for Audi and he rips customers RS4's day and night.

My mum took her new VW in for its first service the other day, no problems with it - just needed oil and filters etc. However it come back with 15 extra miles on the clock. Obviously there was no need to test drive the dam thing. The lease company have told her that if the garage can not come up with a good explanation they will lose their business (800 cars a year). Pretty annoying really though - Prolly went to pick up lunch in it
 
Mini always take mine out after they've changed things? if you read in your service booklet it will tell you what they do during the service.

Edit: but its normally just around the block tbh
 
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happened to mum once, but the garage were up front about it. She only drives a 1.0 polo.

They just told her they were busy, the van had broken down and could they use her car to collect parts (about 2miles away). They gave her a few things for free so both sides were happy.
 
Nathan said:
I know it happens all the time, my cousin works for Audi and he rips customers RS4's day and night.
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He deserves to be fired and never work in the motor industry again. People trust their very expensive pride and joys to him and he does that. Appalling.
 
[TW]Fox;10077726 said:
He deserves to be fired and never work in the motor industry again. People trust their very expensive pride and joys to him and he does that. Appalling.
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Thing is, even his boss does it :( He said he was in a customers car with his boss racing an R1 :(
 
Nathan said:
Thing is, even his boss does it :( He said he was in a customers car with his boss racing an R1 :(
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You may find he's just bragging to sound cool and doesn't actually do it. Lots of people say things they've not done to sound good. At least I hope thats the case.
 
[TW]Fox;10077743 said:
You may find he's just bragging to sound cool and doesn't actually do it. Lots of people say things they've not done to sound good. At least I hope thats the case.
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As far as Im aware its pretty common place, ive got a few friends who work in dealerships, as already mentioned even the bosses often rag customers cars.
 
[TW]Fox;10077743 said:
You may find he's just bragging to sound cool and doesn't actually do it. Lots of people say things they've not done to sound good. At least I hope thats the case.
Click to expand...

No, he is not the sort of person to brag about stuff like this unfortuantly. Bit of a nightmare for RS owners though. His brother works for Honda as a mechanic, although he does not rag customers cars, his fellow colleagues do
 
i have a little 4 mile circuit i find good for road testing, sometimes there are issues which means the car has to go out again.

road test for noise
replace part
road test again.

so there can be 8 miles just for a noise, longer road test may be required for faults that are hard to trace, or ones that only happen after the customer has picked up a car which has run perfectly for you all day :-(

15 miles for a 1 st service is excessive but i doubt you will get anywhere.

how you drive the car depends on the reason it came in, just ragging for the hell of it isnt a good idea.
 
Can work the other way round, my Mum's Clio was in for a new exhaust, I picked it up and as soon as I got over 20mph on my way home the heatshield was rattling
 
I work next to a car dealership. Its Skoda now but was Mitsubishi.

They use to rag the heck out of the EVOs and do the same with RS Skodas. One of the mechs tried to donut an EVO5 in the car park and put it into a wall. Fortunately for them it wasn't a customer car.

They are currently having awful problems with a Impreza P1. Not sure what the issue is but its back and for there at least once a fortnight. They got one lad on the case who I think does all there non/franchise performance cars and I've driven an Impreza he changed the clutch on. From that alone its small wonder the P1 keeps coming back.

I had a massive argument with Kwik Fit once when they did something with my Impreza (Can't think what now) I asked why it had been driven 12 miles and what were they doing in the next town as someone I know saw them.

They just front it out. Bunch of losers IMO.
 
I once got mine back from the garage and was chatting to the mechanic

"that's a good'un - i managed to get flames out the back"

:D
 
Every car at the Bentley, Ferrari and Maserati dealership I've been working at gets road tested, always with 2 technicians in the car. I know of a couple of incedents of elevens being left on the road but generally I think they are driven carefully. Oh and there's 6 different road test routes for them to use, all pre-recorded.
 
When I had the Scoob I had a very trick boost controller (GReddy E-01) that had a handy realtime record/playback feature, so you could watch back a realtime graph of the revs/boost curves.

When I took the car into a main dealers for a large service, I reset the controller. When I picked the car up I watched the graph back and as expected they had taken it for a good thrashing. I asked them why it was necceserry to take it for a thrashing, and they said 'we always take them round the block, but it only goes round the block and I can assure you it doesn't get thrashed'.

The looks on thier faces was priceless when I played back the graph and proved they were lying......
 
My local BMW dealer always put a few miles of Road test in, and its handy as it does help them when its just some intermittant rattle/noise your trying to get fixed.

A good mechanic can often spot faults in a short test drive that would take hours of carefull study if they can only work on the car 'in the shop'.

Ok, they shouldnt really be borrowing customers cars to collect parts, etc. But I think that the good garages are quite a bit more carefull than they were 10 years ago, when stories of cars coming back with hundreds of extra miles was actually quite common.
 
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