Servicing is really where we get our chance to shine…

As a specialist we really have seen it all when it comes to bad servicing and pride ourselves on being the absolute best.

Did you know that the Office of Fair trading (OFT) reported that consumers no longer have to have their car serviced by a franchised dealer to comply with the manufacturer’s warranty? When a vehicle has full main dealer service history we often see the common ‘fast fit’ approach to servicing.

New Mini Specialists

A main dealer’s hourly rate is almost double that of an independent. We see corners cut regularly to keep costs down and for dealers to remain competitive. For a main dealer to service a vehicle for the same price as an independent they physically have to do less work.

BMW date stamp all of their parts, so if a date of 08/08 is printed on the side of a fuel filter and the vehicle was made in August 2008 we know the filters is original to the vehicle.

For this reason, we operate a check and change policy when we do an inspection II service. We start at the top and work backwards.

One of our highly experienced technicians’s will physically check every component and service item to assess what needs replacing. Why throw away a perfectly good filter to replace it with another good filter? Every item that we change during a service will be kept to show you upon collection.

This style of servicing leaves nothing down to assumption, We call this our ‘C-Service’.

Diesel Service Kit

A typical ‘C-Service’ kit.

We do several different types of services to fulfill your vehicles needs:

A-ServiceOil Service – This includes a oil and oil filter change, tyre pressures, screen wash and a brief safety check.

B-ServiceIntrim Service – This includes a oil and oil filter change, strip, clean and un-seize rear brakes, full brakes check, tyre pressures, screenwash and a safety check.

C-ServiceFull Service – This includes a oil and oil filter change, air filter, fuel filter, pollen (micro) filter, spark plugs (if applicable), strip, clean and un-seize rear brakes, full brakes check, tyre pressures, screenwash and a comprehensive safety check.

CBS Servicing – Later Mini’s have a new system called condition based service (CBS), although this service method works well on a new vehicle, as time goes on when the vehicle requires such items like air filters and fuel filters, you quickly discover they are not built into CBS.

In a nutshell, if you serviced your vehicle exactly as CBS stated these items would never get changed. We advise our customers to come away from CBS servicing and back to a yearly service like the previous generation of vehicles as the service is far more comprehensive.

Mini’s are notoriously poorly serviced within the dealer network as they are usually sold with a service pack. As such they get the absolute bare minimum service as the customer is not paying for the service.

These brake discs were removed from a vehicle with full (recent) dealer service history and were overlooked. This is a perfect example of not looking over the vehicle correctly during a service, these brake discs were almost certainly factory fitted and heavily corroded.

Brake Disc

Please give one of our friendly service team a call for more information on 0118 958 3481 and they will be more than happy to quote you on your service.