VW Golf : First Service

I haven’t mentioned my car for a while – which I had intended to. Largely this is because it is rather boring as well as being a bit overweight, slow and depressingly grey: rather like me, I suppose. Actually, I still like it. For all its dullness it’s a rather nice place to be. Having now owned it for the best part of two years it decided that it wanted to be serviced. I did wonder about using my local garage for this but as it is still under warranty I thought I would give the local VW dealership a go.

The dealer actually came recommended. At least, one of my colleagues had used them and seemed quite happy with the service. I had a look at the fixed service prices and they looked quite a bit more expensive than our local independent chap does the Toyota for. However, I did have to take into account that VWs run on magic fairy oil which is different to normal engine oil in that it is jet black like oil from an old school diesel and costs £20 per litre. At least it cost that much when I bought a bottle to top up from Halfords. I suspect it may be cheaper if bought elsewhere but our local car spares shop was out of magic fairy oil and advised only to use magic fairy oil otherwise unspecified bad things would happen.

The actual service was pretty uneventful. I dropped the car off in the morning and took the train back home (I could have had a courtesy car for the day but it seemed like more trouble than it’s worth). The only amusement was when I went to pick the car up and they couldn’t find my details. It turns out that the man who used to own our house used the same dealer and his and my details had become muddled. After that it was a case of settling the bill: £220 for a full service which is not that bad once the cost of the magic fairy oil had been taken into account and they had washed it for me as well.

The variable service thing seems to be working quite well in that I had covered 18,500 miles in it since I bought it and the service and top up oil are the only maintenance items I have had to pay for so far. The only fly in the ointment was that the rear brake discs are rusting badly – mainly due to my driving style of long runs with gravity assisted braking. This has happened on previous cars with rear disks and I’ll need to get them changed (possibly just before the MOT so I don’t get the same issue twice.) As it is, I’ve had pretty uneventful motoring in it – and so far relatively cheap motoring as well.