My wife's Mini - a badge engineered BMW - was also suffering from cutting out so we contacted the supplying dealer (it's still under warranty) to book it in. No problem said the smiley dealer lady on the phone, in fact we're so customer orientated we'll send our chauffeur (her word) out to collect it, do the software upgrade in the workshop then bring it back to you. How nice to be appreciated we thought. At least we won't have to sit through a sales pitch while we wait.

The bubble only burst when the 'chauffeur' arrived. Morose and virtually monosyllabic, he walked round the car and declared the front tyres were worn beyond the point where he would drive it. That's in the nature of tyres we said, they wear, and one of the other jobs the workshop is going to do is change them. They're still not below the legal minimum so no problem, right? Wrong. We got a lecture about (his) health and safety then he got back in his own chauffeur driven car and was whisked away. The local tyre depot got the tyre job and the car is still both cutting out at junctions and starting itself up randomly.

It all reminded me of the time when as a callow youth biker I got 'randomly' stopped by the police. He spent some time checking the bike's mechanicals and my licence, MOT and insurance, all of which were as they should be. He finally noticed my tax disc only had a week to run and gave me a five minute lecture about how close to the edge legally I now was with my road tax about to expire! Sometime you wonder if you've wandered into a parallel universe where time, money and, particularly, logic have no meaning.

I recently spent up to one day (a whole Sunday no less) looking into changing a 4 wheeler; that was as long as I was prepared to waste of my remaining life in such activity.
And, here in the UK they are open for only 6 hours on Sundays so the clock was ticking.


After two main dealers I ended up with a family run garage company who get their new cars via the allocations made to one of the previously visited main dealers.
That's the moral of this short story; don't waste time with the main dealers but find the business that is interested in you as a customer.
By 3.30 pm that day the deal was done and I went back to doing more interesting things than chasing around car showrooms.

__________________
Dave