Auto Service News

Forgot to tell you about our Ferrari experience and believe it or not it was not our first time. The first time that is to get a call out regarding a Ferrari that had broken down about 2 miles from our garage. I would love to say it was a great driving experience taking that Ferrari back put on the road on a test drive after getting it started again, but it would be a lie. Because just like the first Ferrari call out we got about 2 years ago, there was strict instructions not to touch the car.

Please take the car away from the roadside and lock it up somewhere safe until it can be picked up and taken to a proper Ferrari specialist, was the message. The experience was an amusing one and to be honest we did look under the hood, to the rear if you know what i mean to see if there was something obviously wrong, as we could not see anything within a few seconds, we closed the hood and pushed the car into a safe spot in the garage.

We never met the owner and even though we took some photos we thought it would be inappropriate to publish them here, so our Ferrari experience ended when another recovery vehicle turned up and winched this 430 on to the back.

I had driven a few Ferraris before on a driving experience day. I can see why someone would want to own such a performance machine, but to be honest even if I could afford one, I would still refrain from owning one. It would be cheaper going to a driving experience once a month, which is just about how much most Ferrari owners get to drive the or cars anyway and never in the way they were designed to be driven, fast on a track.

If I had to tell you something about January 2009 it would be it has been cold. Just about everything we have done this month has meant being wrapped up just to keep warm.

First the garage, which to be fair is always cold this time of year even with blowers throwing out the heat, but when the blowers decide not to work, the work just slowed down. At one point we were 2 days behinds with fixing the cars, not because we were busy, but more because we couldn’t expect everyone to stand over a freezing cold car for 4 hours until lunch time.

So everyone was fed hot coffee and regular breaks just to keep people here. The breakdown cover call outs were no better. Just pick a time of day or night where that thermometer went to its lowest point; that would be when the breakdown cover call would come in.

It is inevitable that cold weather increases the likely hood of a recovery call out, but at least when you got back to the garage you would warm up, but not this month. The salvage projects got put on hold which was a shame as prices were very low on the auto salvage auction we use and so would have liked to have bought some more salvage projects in. But when you are behind with customer cars and lacking in space it just did not make any sense to do so.

We have seen an increase in breakdown cover call outs and the amount of times we heard from the owners of the vehicles that normally they would have an annual roadside assistance policy but because money was tight had decided against it and took a chance, was astounding. I can’t believe it, but we are benefitting from the credit crunch and what customers don’t even get is that your car will breakdown credit crunch or not. The weather forecast for this weekend is even colder blizzards, god help us.