There was one loose end from my experience of Marshall Vauxhall. The Vauxhall Corsa has two lights on the petrol gauge. The first tells you "prepare to fill up" and appears when you are about three quarters empty. The next indicates "prepare to walk"! -- you have almost no petrol left. The first of these was not working so I asked for it to be done when I booked the car in.
On arrival, they had no record of that request. I made it again, and ensured that it was logged on the sheet. I was told that to fix this would involve removing the whole dashboard, take an hour and would cost £60; "would I prefer to just live with it"? I said go ahead; being marooned by the roadside has nearly happened twice already.
I got a call mid-morning to say that it wasn't a bulb, and that this wouldn't need to happen after all; the fitter was doing something with the connections.
That was the last I heard of it, and I presumed that it had been fixed. Today I found otherwise.
Lunchtime I rang Marshall Vauxhall. The man who answered the phone knew nothing but promised to ask around and ring back. He rang back shortly after to say that everyone was at a funeral, but that he would get back to me after 2pm. No call came back.
Around 4pm I was returning to Ipswich, so I went in to the showroom in person. None of the staff seemed to know what it was about. One started fiddling slowly with a computer system. Another came off the phone and stood by, watching his colleague interestedly. This seemed absurd, so I asked all of them openly whether they knew about it -- the watcher promptly admitted it was him! I expected an apology for the failure to ring back, but it did not come.
I was told that on the day of the servicing the fitter had decided that the defective light could only be fixed by replacing the complete dashboard, at a price of £200. No-one had called me. No-one apparently knew. They merely ignored it and carried on.
This seemed incredible, so I spoke with the foreman of the garage and verified that this was the story that they were telling me. They one and all seemed to take it for granted that I wouldn't want the problem fixed. Nor did I wish to put my car in yet again just then.
I am left with a problem, and some uncomfortable reflections. If it really does cost this much to fix a trivial problem, then why on earth are they so uninterested in fixing it? Fundamentally for them it's money for old rope. Yet all along I have met resistance. The original request mysteriously being omitted from the job sheet; attempts on check-in to get me to abandon the job; an ambiguous phone call which concealed that the fault was being left; failure to return calls; utter uninterest in getting the car in.
This is a business. Standard retail markup is 50%, so this cannot be less than £130 profit, surely? Why don't they want the money? Is there something I am not being told?
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