Mugged - by a car dealer

When I've had my car serviced, the garage always phones next day to ask if I'm happy and if everything is all right.


This time when they called I wanted to say no, that I'd taken my car in for an oil change and come out with a bill for £900 and I felt as if I'd been mugged. I should have given some negative feedback, but I didn't. The girl calling is their receptionist and she's not the one to be moaning at.


I've always had my last few cars serviced by Andy Bunyan in the village. He's a good, old-fashioned engineer, who will repair rather than replace and will always find you the best deal. When I got my current car - a 1996 BMW 520d Touring - I thought it all seemed a bit complicated and high-tech for Andy.


He's well versed in the world of sensors and electronic-management systems, but the BMW takes things to a new level. It has a smart key which stores all faults and alerts and which can be read by inserting it into a special terminal at the dealer; also the car has an on-board computer and display which gives information about service requirements. It's not one of the simple, mileage-based counters, which just take the current mileage, count down 10,000 and then say it's time for a service. This tells you when your oil is due to be changed; how many miles you have left on your brake pads and when your MoT is due. It even gives you a count-down on the diesel particulate filter - and that lasts 100,000 miles.


So I took the view that the BMW might be better taken to the main dealer despite Andy saying that he did several BMWs. Well, I've paid dearly for the lesson, but this last one took the biscuit, mainly because I wasn't prepared for such a bill.


The computer said I was due an oil change, so I booked it in and also asked them to repair the rear tailgate window catch, which had been diagnosed as a faulty switch at £70 plus fitting. BMW estates have a nice feature where the rear window is hinged as well as the main tailgate. It means you can just open the window to drop something in the boot, which is very convenient, and it also means you can really pack the boot solid when you're going on holiday or moving house and then keep adding things through the back window. On other cars you'd be pushing stuff in with one hand and trying to close the tailgate with the other.


Anyway, I thought I'd have that done as I was only expecting a small charge for the oil change. When I got to the dealer, the key told the receptionist that my brake fluid was due to be changed in a couple of months and also there was just a couple of hundred miles before the front brake pads needed to be changed. Did I want those doing at the same time? I said yes to the brake pads, but the brake fluid could wait until the MoT was due in June.


After a hour, the receptionist came to tell me they had taken the brake pads off and checked the thickness of the discs and they were a couple of mm below the minimum recommended thickness. Did I want those changing too? I said OK. A little while later, the message was that they'd fitted a new tailgate switch, but it hadn't worked. The problem must be a bad connection or broken wire and not the switch. Because their engineer had misdiagnosed the problem, they wouldn't charge me for the switch, but did I want them to try to find the problem (with the warning that it might take some time as they'd have to remove some trim)? I was a bit miffed, because, clearly, the chap who diagnosed the fault had not tested the switch, he'd just assumed that was the problem. Now, they were assuming that it was a broken wire and wanted me to pay them £100 an hour to see if that was the case. I said no thank you.


Anyway, the bill for oil change, new brake pads and new front discs was £906 including VAT. That included £395 for parts and £360 for labour. The oil change also requires a number of other filter changes. I was charged £83 for oil (fully synthetic) and there was just under 6 litres of that, plus £15 for an oil filter, £21 for an air filter, £34 for a fuel filter and £67 for a microfilter (I think that goes on the air-conditioning). Brake pads were £85 and brake discs £147.


So you can see why I feel as if I'd been mugged. For its MoT in June, I'll take the car to Andy. It might be cheaper to buy him one of those key readers for his PC than to continue to take it to the main dealer.