Vauxhall 2

A quick recap, or you could read the whole of part one here. A couple of weeks ago my neighbour accidentally clunked the front of my car which resulted in very minor impact damage to the body and the parking sensor system returning a fault and not working.

I took the car to the local Vauxhall dealership (Evans Halshaw Nottingham) who advised me a dodgy paint repair to the bumper had obscured the offside parking sensor on the front bumper, which was why it was returning the fault. The only problem with this diagnosis is my car has never had a paint repair (dodgy or otherwise), and I’ve owned it since brand new. Evans Halshaw couldn’t produce the mechanic who made this diagnosis, so they let me off the £120 ‘diagnosis fee’ but not the £20 ‘courtesy car’ cost.

I rang a localish service garage and described the problem to them. They put me on to a vehicle electrician who said he’d come out and have a look at the problem.

Right, you’re up to date. The story continues.

The electrician turned up as arranged, removed what needed to be removed so he could get at the parking sensor. He soon got that out too, it looked like this:

Clearly this has been broken. The electrician said it had been pushed back into a bar behind it, and that impact had damaged the sensor (as you can clearly see).

I asked him if the front of the sensor looked like it had been resprayed. He inspected it closely, ran his thumb over it and said no, it hadn’t been resprayed at all. The problem, he said (as if we couldn’t actually see it) was the parking sensor had been broken by impact.

The electrician said he’d get a new one ordered and would contact me when it arrived. A couple of days ago he rang, said the part was in, and would it be convenient to come and fit it in half an hour? Well yes, it certainly would be convenient.

He arrived soon afterwards, took bits apart, fitted the new part, tested it, got paid and went away. The car’s parking sensors all work perfectly and my neighbour has agreed to pay for the cost of repair.

And that’s the almost conclusion to the story. The total cost (2x visits, parts and labour) was £255. I shudder to think how much Evans Halshaw Vauxhall would have charged. If you can’t trust the Vauxhall main dealer to get a fault diagnosis right, what’s the point of going to the Vauxhall main dealer?

2 thoughts on “Vauxhall 2

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.