paulatthehug

I had my first experience of Hawco today as I'd put the Yeti in for a big service and MoT including cam belt replacement and new rear discs. This was booked 28 days ago. I also live in Nairn so taking it in for service involves 90 miles of driving (as my wife has to go there and back twice in our other vehicle). Despite having 28 days' notice she announces when I arrive "oh, we can't do the discs today, the pads are on back order". Not impressed with that at all. Why didn't they phone me to reschedule? There was time before the MoT expired. Eventually she concedes that they can "probably" source the pads locally. So that was Strike 1 (although they did source the pads locally so at least this was done!) Two hours after I drop it off I get the link to the "vehicle health check video". In the bad old days of Arnold Clark this was one of the good bits in that the mechanic walked around under the Yeti and showed you things under the vehicle. This one, after the 30 seconds of canned intro video consisted of the camera pointing firmly at the boot while he said "hi mate, it's failed its MoT due to the horns not working". That was it. Fifteen seconds of a 75 second video. Strike 2 The page with the video (see below) also said "Horn inop - will require further investigation - suspect both horns faulty - mot fail" with a quoted price to fix of £339.05. Bear in mind both my wife and I had had occasion to use the horn (rare for me at least) in the past week and it was fine then so I didn't believe both had failed. Sounded like a wiring fault somewhere. Still a bit odd though that it had failed just then and that was an outrageous price to fix it (oh, and a pair of horns is less than £20 online). Strike 3 They then phoned me up to talk about this (oh, and they did offer to "just investigate" but they wanted over £100 just to do that) . I tell them I'm not paying that, I'll get it fixed locally. "Oh, we don't advise you drive it when it's failed its MoT" she says. Uh huh. Horn inoperable is "major" (i.e. a fail) rather than "minor" (advisory) but not "dangerous" so it's perfectly legal for me to drive as the old MoT is not expired and I'm not at all impressed that she's relying on my lack of knowledge of MoT law to try to keep the business. Strike 4 And now we come to the best part. I go to pick it up, book the MoT retest for next week (I'd already booked my local garage to fix it in a few days), and go out to my car, turn on the ignition and press the horn. BARRRP BARRRP. Yup, it's working just fine. Strike 5 and out So I now have an MoT certificate and I've had to apologetically cancel my booking at my local garage but as for Hawco the most charitable explanation is that the Yeti has an intermittent fault ... but that seems unlikely. The next is that their MoT tester is simply incompetent (did he turn the ignition key on?). At worst however I'm left wondering if I'd paid the £100+ to investigate would they have "found the fault and it's working now" ... Anyway I won't be using them again any time soon, if ever. Time to go back to relying on the non-franchise garage in Nairn.

Back in May 2019 I posted about an error code I was getting which apparently meant that the support heater pump was failing. Posts I found elsewhere at the time suggested that this is a fairly common fault. Last time it was replaced under warranty as the car was less than three years old but this time around I'm going to have to pay I fear but I'm wondering if there's any mileage in arguing that this pump should last longer than 2.5 years (especially as this is a low mileage vehicle, I'm only doing about 3,000 miles a year). I fear Skoda will say that the two year parts warranty has expired. The added complication here is that the pump was replaced by Skoda's then dealer in Invernesss (Arnold Clark) but the franchise has now moved to Hawco. Any thoughts? TIA.

I did that initially (I used to drive Series III Landies and there it was compulsory) but up here in the Highlands every other person has a Yeti so it doesn't seem to be a thing :-(

My Yeti is only the second automatic I've ever owned (the first being a Range Rover). DSG is not the same beast as traditional hydraulic auto, it's just a manual gearbox controlled by the car. And in general it does a very good job at it and reads your mind pretty well. The only thing we both found initially, coming from driving a campervan where you had to be pretty binary on the throttle pedal, is that it's very sensitive to changes in pedal position when trying to anticipate your needs. My wife especially found she was more comfortable using manual mode initially but even she now generally leaves it in Drive most of the time. The only time I override the box is when I switch to S mode to overtake, but TBH most of the time you really don't need to. I really like the DSG transmission. I really think it's the future, at least until we all go electric.

Yeah, I've heard good things about them. My problem is that for medical reasons I can't drive 160 miles in a day. Thankfully we've got a good local garage who will be handling my routine servicing after the final AC service and MoT. They already changed the gearbox oil (and charged me considerably less than AC Skoda were quoting to do so).

That sort of thing is all too common when companies let ****ers design their web sites. 😞 Unless someone else takes on the Skoda dealership locally, so somewhere between Inverness and Elgin for me, my next car will not be a Skoda. Which is a shame.

No great loss. I've still got one pre-paid service and MoT with them but it's usable at any Arnold Clark and they've got a load of other dealerships in the same road so I guess I'll use one of those. I wonder if Hawco Group will take on the franchise now (assuming they survive). They're already VW/Audi so it would be an easy one to add to their portfolio ...

I plugged my Carista OBD2 Bluetooth Adaptor into Zebedee for the first time today, mainly to check if it was still showing fault code P16C700, which is what the VAG Roadside Assistance man found about ten days ago when my emission control system warning light came on and stayed on (it's since turned off 😣). The good news (FSVO "good") is that it's still showing the code (or at least the short form of it), despite the warning light having gone off. It's good news as it's booked into Inverness Skoda on Wednesday for a warranty repair and they'd said if they couldn't see the code using their diagnostics now that the dash light was out they wouldn't be able to replace the support heater pump (which code P16C700 was telling them is intermittent) under warranty. However as you can see it's also showing two other fault codes: 20557 on the engine and 00012 on the infotainment system. My Google Foo is weak and I can't find any identification for 20557 or 00012 ... so I thought I'd ask here if anyone could help me identify what they mean. TIA.