Sheet 05 · Questions
The things people ring up to ask us.
Written out properly so you do not have to ring. If yours is not here, it will get a straight answer on the phone.
Updated quarterly
The questions we get asked on the phone
- No. Block Exemption rules mean a manufacturer warranty stays valid as long as the service is carried out to schedule with parts of matching quality — which is exactly what we do, and we stamp the book and keep the invoice trail to prove it.
Three things people believe that are not true
“The dealer has to do the servicing”
They do not, and they have not since 2003. Any qualified garage using correct-specification parts and following the schedule keeps your warranty intact. We stamp the book, keep the invoices, and have never had a claim refused for a car we service.
“A warning light means a big bill”
Usually it means a sensor, a connector or a battery that has dropped below the threshold the module wants. About a third of the lights we read turn out to cost under a hundred pounds to put right, and we tell you which category yours is in before we start.
“Older cars are money pits”
Neglected cars are money pits. A well-maintained twenty-year-old car with a known history is frequently cheaper to run than a five-year-old one with a complicated turbo and an appetite for injectors. We will tell you honestly which one yours is.
What a warning light on your dashboard actually means
An amber light is the car telling you something is outside the range a module expects. It is not a countdown and it is very rarely an emergency, but it does mean a fault code has been stored, and a stored code is a free clue that stops being free once somebody clears it. Please do not let a parts shop reset it for nothing on the forecourt: you have then thrown away the freeze-frame data that tells us what the engine was doing at the exact moment it happened. Drive it in, let us read it properly, and you will usually get an answer in twenty minutes. A red light is different — stop somewhere safe and ring us.
How long things actually last, and when to worry
Brake pads: 25,000 to 40,000 miles, less if you mostly drive in town. Discs: usually two sets of pads. A cambelt: whatever the manufacturer says, and the interval is in years as well as miles, so a low-mileage car can still be overdue. Batteries: five to seven years, and they nearly always fail on the first proper cold morning after a fortnight of short journeys. Clutches: 60,000 to 120,000 miles, entirely depending on who has been driving. Tyres: the tread is not the only thing — rubber hardens with age and a five-year-old tyre with plenty of tread can still be past its best. None of this is a sales pitch. It is what we would tell a friend in the pub.
What to do if something goes wrong after we have worked on your car
Ring us the same day and ask for Nell. Every job carries three years or 36,000 miles on parts and labour, and a warranty is only worth anything if claiming on it is easy — so there is no form, no assessment period and no argument about whether it is related. Bring the car back, we look at it first thing, and if it is our work we put it right at our cost including the recovery if you cannot drive it in. In forty-seven years the number of times that has been a fight is zero, and we would like to keep it there.
Still stuck?
Ask us the awkward one. We prefer those.
The questions people are embarrassed to ask are usually the ones worth asking. Nobody here has ever made a customer feel stupid for not knowing what a cambelt is.
Book the ramp01373 470 118
Phone answered by a person, in the building, between 7.30am and 5.30pm