Skoda dealer north Highlands

[farty]

Arnold Clark Skoda, Inverness has closed permanently.

 

But Hawco VW has taken on the franchise.  My car is going in to have the Haldex V oil change and filter clean.  Cost will be about £120.

[fabdavrav]

Hawco have taken on the servicing & parts for Skoda.... not to worry ..I've known Hawco's for 26yrs, especially the parts dept..& they are quite good to say the least!

 

You may find that some of the staff (mechanics) are from the old Delmore cars!!.

[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.

 

Edited 5 October, 2021 by paulatthehug

[BoxerBoy]

A disgraceful performance from the dealer.

 

But incompetence is not uncommon. And I’m being polite.