Time to name and shame I think......
Don't what ever you do use Arnold Clark of Stourbridge for any work on your Fiat.
See below for a tale of woe (taken from a letter of complaint to my lease company)! [
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My car was booked in for its 12000 service on 25 Feb 2004. Part of the service work is to check the tyre pressures. The car has pressure sensing valves and so the valve shafts are metal (not rubber). The car was fitted with anti-tamper valve covers, and during the winter, these must have corroded to the valve shafts, as they were difficult to remove. I didn't know this however until I got the car back from its service.
The car was booked in for 3 days - one for the service work, and 2 so they could hopefully find (and fix) a squeak (somewhere in the area of the rear driver wheel) that the car has been suffering with from day one. I unfortunately had to get the car back from them a day early as I needed its carrying capacity for work on the Friday, and the courtesy car they had given me was a Fiat Punto (a lot smaller than a Ulysse). When I collected the car, I asked what work was outstanding, and was only told that they hadn't managed to identify the squeak (they had managed to work down to an area, but nothing more, but I’d already told them that).
I took the car from them and drove it down to London the following morning. During the journey, I started getting puncture warnings, so I stopped the car and did a quick visual check (it was snowing at the time, so it was difficult to check it properly). I could see nothing wrong but one of the wheels did look a bit flatter than the others, so I drove slowly to the next services and tried to remove the valve cover (as I was intending to pump up the wheel). The top of the cover came away, leaving a small metal cap on the valve. I tried the same on the other wheels. The same thing happened on 2 more wheels, and on the last one, the valve cover came off. There was no way I could remove this inner cap. After ringing the garage, I was told that they had a problem removing the valve caps and so had ordered a new set of valves.
As the tyre didn't look too bad, I continued slowly on the journey, got to London and parked the car. When I came back to it 6 hours later, the wheel was flat. I removed it and put the spare on, and in doing so found a big screw in the inner wall of the now flat tyre. I cannot see how this could have gotten where it was between me collecting the car and taking the wheel off, so assume it happened while in their workshops.
The following day I took the car to Quikfit to get the damaged type replaced. As this was on one of the wheels with the stuck valve caps, they had to remove the valve and fit a normal one so they could pump the tyre up again and make it usable.
The following week, the car went in to Arnold Clark to have the valves swapped. They only needed to swap the valves on 3 of the 4 driving wheels, and they needed to fit a new valve on the spare wheel. They only replaced 2 of the valves that needed doing, swapped (for a new valve) the one that didn't need swapping, and also managed to damage the thread on the remaining valve.
The car was booked back in again to get this rectified, and this time all valves were swapped as required. The body computer wasn't however reset correctly to acknowledge the new valves, and so yet another session in the workshop was needed to rectify this.
The car was then with me for about a month and a half with no additional problems until on April 14 it had a mechanical problem while I was on my way to Birmingham Airport for an early morning flight. As the car was still driving (all be it very badly) and I was close to the airport, I finished the journey so I could catch my flight, and then made arrangements for the car to be collected from the airport and taken to Arnold Clark.
It was delivered to them on Thursday 15 April, along with as accurate a description as possible of what happened and how the car was driving (which was basically that it was not firing on at least one cylinder, and that it was vibrating badly and blowing smoke from the exhaust.
All they did for the first day and a half was try and find a problem using their diagnostic computer. They found nothing. This was no surprise, as the car's body computer was not reporting a fault. When they finally got a mechanic to actually examine the engine, they found that there was a problem with two of the diesel injectors, so stopped the examination there while they waited for 4 days to get replacement injectors. When they arrived and were fitted, there was an additional problem identified, which meant that they had to swap the engine out. They've been pretty tight-lipped about this problem, but one of the mechanics told me afterwards that two of the cylinders were damaged (probably because the car was driven for a time after the injectors failed). This meant another 4 day delay while they waited for a replacement engine.
Had they continued with their investigations at the time they found the injector problem, they could have identified this a lot sooner and had all the needed parts delivered at the same time. I'd had to repeatedly chase them for updates (as I needed to schedule activity around the car's availability (or lack of)) - I was only ever pro-actively contacted twice in the two weeks with an update from them.
I finally got the vehicle back on Friday 30 April at about 5:50pm. I was told when I collected the car that they had noticed a screw in one of the tyres (which I know wasn't there before the car went in to them - I checked after last time), but had done nothing about it as the tyre in question was not below pressure. I understand why they couldn't change the tyre (as my lease company only authorise Quikfit to do this), but they could at least have swapped this with the spare wheel rather than have me drive away in what could have been an accident waiting to happen.
We drove the car between Dudley and Heathrow airport that evening (I was due to fly to America the following morning). Within 10 minutes of setting off, the car started beeping and flashing a message on the screen that the engine coolant level was low. We stopped and checked, and the coolant level was just below the minimum fill level. We drove to the next set of services, brought some deionised water, and topped it up. From then, no more messages.
We also noticed that there was a strong smell of burning oil, and that it was difficult to engage 1st and 2nd gear. We assumed that the smell of oil was from residual spillage from the previous 2 weeks work, and that the gear change difficulty was just a poorly adjusted clutch. My wife made arrangements to take the car back to them to have this checked out while I was in America. The earliest they could do this was Friday (7 May), and so my wife took the car in first thing that morning, and made arrangements to collect the car at 1pm.
Lunchtime came and she'd heard nothing, but rather than just go down and assume the car was ready, she rang them to see how it was, and was told that they'd have to keep the car in as it had an oil leak.....
The work for this job was finished yesterday (10 May), and it turned out that they had not replaced a damaged seal between the gearbox and the engine when they re-fitted the engine from the previous work, and so the old seal was leaking oil onto the exhaust where it was burning off. So from the last work, they returned the car to me in a state where it was not only exposed to possible problems because of the screw in the tyre and the low coolant level, but it was also a potential fire hazard! They were also asked during this final work to swap the wheel with the damaged tyre with the spare, but we got the car back with the wheel where it was (and just pumped back up)!
I have the vehicle back now, but have been less than impressed with the situation so far - there have been a number of repeat visits to the dealer as a result of what I can only put down to their incompetence. I doubt that I will use them again, even though it will mean a longer journey for any future work.
John
