What does M.O.T. stand for anyway?
Car passed it's MOT yesterday, despite a crack in the windscreen which I am sure is spreading (and which, of course, I will neglect until the windscreen implodes at 80mph in the fast lane of the M40 during a thunderstorm, meaning at least I'll have been shredded to death long before the resulting crash kills me), and it only cost 45 quid!
This was astonishing, as you know, the last time I went into a garage I came out again after forking out a four figure sum for those bastards at VW fixing my exhaust and, I assume, flying in a mechanic from Germany to hand-tighten my sump.
The difference was that this time, I left it to the wife to sort things out. Instead of going to a main dealer and essentially paying for two receptionists, 700sq ft of sales floorspace and a machine giving you free coffee, Lou instead went to an excellent little local garage where the only woman on show was Miss August and the chap who looked after our car had a respectable amount of grease under each fingernail and smelled faintly of swarf.
I will, of course, be taking the car back there when it needs a service. My only concern is that these days as well as changing oil and so on, the garage has to tell the computer that it's changed the oil. Not that the VW dealership managed to do that on all occasions, leading me to suspect that they didn't service the thing at all but simply cleaned it and charged a fortune.
Still, the VW's computer is hardly HAL9000, all it does is flash up 'service' every now and then. Presumably this is when the car needs a service, though I have always suspected that the computer was linked directly to the VW mainframe and, every time the coffers of the company ran low, the cars instructed their owners to return to the garage for further fleecing.
No more though. Plough Lane Coachworks are the chaps for me. Good news for me, bad news for the MD of VW, who will have to finance his own trips to the Bahamas from now on.
This was astonishing, as you know, the last time I went into a garage I came out again after forking out a four figure sum for those bastards at VW fixing my exhaust and, I assume, flying in a mechanic from Germany to hand-tighten my sump.
The difference was that this time, I left it to the wife to sort things out. Instead of going to a main dealer and essentially paying for two receptionists, 700sq ft of sales floorspace and a machine giving you free coffee, Lou instead went to an excellent little local garage where the only woman on show was Miss August and the chap who looked after our car had a respectable amount of grease under each fingernail and smelled faintly of swarf.
I will, of course, be taking the car back there when it needs a service. My only concern is that these days as well as changing oil and so on, the garage has to tell the computer that it's changed the oil. Not that the VW dealership managed to do that on all occasions, leading me to suspect that they didn't service the thing at all but simply cleaned it and charged a fortune.
Still, the VW's computer is hardly HAL9000, all it does is flash up 'service' every now and then. Presumably this is when the car needs a service, though I have always suspected that the computer was linked directly to the VW mainframe and, every time the coffers of the company ran low, the cars instructed their owners to return to the garage for further fleecing.
No more though. Plough Lane Coachworks are the chaps for me. Good news for me, bad news for the MD of VW, who will have to finance his own trips to the Bahamas from now on.
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