Westover Skoda in Bournemouth formerly Westover Wimbourne, what an absolute shambles!
Had a Skoda Fabia that wouldn’t start diagnosed by the AA as a faulty key cluster, and towed to the Bournemouth dealership. Westover claimed the problem was with the ECU and that it was burning out. Several ECUs later the problem was still not fixed, and the problem was then claimed to be a wire in the wrong place. After that a key cluster was installed that seemed to ‘fix’ the fault, 3 months after breakdown.
On the day of collection we paid £1,000, and didn’t even make it home before the car went into fault again! Westover collected the car, leaving a courtesy car outside locked, without keys and refused the use of it. They then claimed after roughly a week that the compression was down in cylinder 1, causing the faults, even though the car had only done 45,000 miles. Having spoken to a couple of reputable independent mechanics, they seem to think it could be either faulty ignition coils or MAP sensor.
Westover and Skoda UK customer services seem to think 3 months is a satisfactory period to hold a car without a courtesy car and even said that the fault was nothing to do with the repair. They refused to discuss fixing the fault or providing a refund or goodwill gesture towards a repair. Surely once a car comes out the garage it is expected to work?! The car is still parked on our drive since it was returned in December 2015 and hasn’t been used since. The only solution Skoda offered was the purchase of a new car, which seems to be their main aim!
Customer services don’t return calls, listen to problems or even talk to other members of the team. A specific car (second hand) was offered and then sold to another customer before a test drive could be arranged. A shame that such a large company/franchise demonstrated such poor service.
We (and my family) would never use Westover Skoda again.
Has anyone had any similarly poor experiences, and did you manage to resolve it?
