VW Golf : Going Independent

It’s nearly 2 years since I had my VW Golf serviced at the main dealer in Stirling. Last week the car’s on-board computer decided that it had enough and the service light came on. I was happy enough with the service last time and went to phone up the dealer only to discover that they had been taken over by a well-known and somewhat monopolistic Scottish motor retailer and, for once, I really could not be bothered to dig through the garage to find my barge-pole.

As it was, I used the local independent garage that is just 30 seconds walk down the road from me. This has two great advantages: firstly I can dump the car off and walk home without having to worry about courtesy cars and/or public transport; and secondly they are cheaper – quite how much is debateable as VW offer a fixed price service regime which in theory would have given me a guaranteed service but in practice would have resulted in the well-known and somewhat monopolistic Scottish motor retailer finding all sorts of extra things that they would insist needed instant attention.

So as it was, the service cost £65 less than the VW “fixed-price” offer as well as saving me the hassle and expense of a trip (well, two trips) into Stirling. Having looked at the bill the bulk of the cost comes down to VW’s patented fairy-oil which retails at a similar cost to a decent single-malt whisky and the spark plugs which are spectacularly expensive due to being made out of unobtainium. When I first owned a car (going back to a 1980’s VW) one of the big advantages was that the service items often only cost pennies. I suppose that’s progress for you.

So after nearly four years of ownership I seem to have become somewhat less precious about the service stamps – I’ve still got the service stamp from the independent garage but I’ve saved myself a day of hassle, £65 quid and, what’s more, they have actually done a really good job of it: as soon as I started it up the engine was back to the eerie silence from when I first bought it, they had fixed a problem with a binding brake calliper which had been irritating the hell out of me for a couple of weeks and it was also spotless as the apprentice had washed off all the Winter road dirt so that I could see out of the windows again. Also, I have also supported a local business rather than a faceless multi-national or a well-known and somewhat monopolistic Scottish motor retailer.