Getting cars fixed and serviced seems to be becoming a real issue for me and our drivers. As I have said many times before, just getting them booked in is a major problem. You have to wait for someone to answer, listen to the music, press 1, 2, 3 or 4. Then, speak to someone at a remote location, who really doesn’t know what you want – or what you are talking about. Recently I have managed to ‘short-cut’ the system a bit, by trying, and not always succeeding, in getting the number of the service receptionist at the garage. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
We’ve had a couple of incidents recently, where I have been left a bit disillusioned by the dealership’s lack of professionalism. One of our drivers took in their car because the engine management light was on, and it is still under warranty. It had been there all day before they diagnosed a faulty water temperature sensor. Anyway, they took it out, cleaned it, and put it back. On collection, the receptionist told our driver if it happened again, to take it back – as they had the part in stock. Three miles down the road, the light was back on, so I phoned, and booked it in again three weeks later – another day off the road! Why didn’t they just do it right in the first place?
Another of our vehicles went in for a simple service, and the receptionist called to say two of the tyres were down at the limit – and it needed new ones, as it wasn’t really safe for our driver to collect. A difficult decision for me, as we have our own contract with a national tyre supplier. I called them asked how long to fit the tyres either at the depot or the driver’s home.
Anyway, our driver took it straight from the garage to the tyre fitters, only to be told there was at least 3,000-4,000 miles left on the tyres! I then wasted the tyre fitter’s time, by telling them to leave them for now. I was fuming with the garage, thanks to the false information they had given me, absolutely fuming. Times are tight, and the safety of our drivers and other road users is most important – but the garage should have been a little more honest.
We no longer have any vehicles on our fleet that fall foul of Ultra Low Emission Zones (ULEZ), or Clean Air Zones. To be honest, I’m not sure what the difference is between the two, but it doesn’t matter, as we don’t need to worry about it. One of our drivers was talking about it the other day, as he was asking if his vehicle was compliant. “Of course it is,” I told him. However, he told me he’d established a way of working out if where he was going was or wasn’t a ULEZ – or the other one. “You don’t need signs to tell you,” he said. “Just look at Postman Pat’s red vans, and that will give you an indication. If they are fairly new, you are in a Clean Air Zone – or the other one! If you see old 12, 13 or 14-plate vans, you know you’re not in a ‘Zone’ where you must pay a charge, or a fine.”
Please don’t use our driver’s rough rule of thumb as gospel, best check it out officially, but it’s an interesting theory, nonetheless.
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