Poor Penelope Pitstop is still more likely to be seen as a soft target

IKNEW something was amiss as soon as I was handed a bill longer than the Takata Recall list. Among eye-wateringly expensive odds and sods (plus VAT), what struck me most was the £6.99 charge for anti-freeze. Ushering over the garage owner, who went by the call sign Speedy (I kid you not!), I asked the overalled oracle to show me where this magical liquid had been deposited.

Speedy thought for a very long moment then pointed vaguely at the front end of a car that had been christened by cruel friends, with a penchant for Freud, my Moby Dick

– a matt white 1980 whale-tailed Porsche 911.

Ten out of ten for trying, Speedy, but wrong end of the car and wrong kind of engine.

What did Herman Melville write? Ignorance is the parent of fear. Well, right then I’d no way of knowing what work had actually been carried out on my air-cooled chariot and that made me fear the worst.

That was more than 15 years ago but it was not the first or last time a garage would try to pull a fast one or spectacularly fail to deliver.

There was the repair to an Alfa Romeo Spider, which had been reversed rather ignominiously into a bollard by the Mrs.

After a week in surgery and boasting a new, super-smooth, shiny silver and perfectly rounded rear arch, you’d never have known it had suffered a ding – except there was also no longer the sharp crease that had once flowed along its Italian flank. Epic fail.

Worse, the girlfriend left the same week and, true to form, never looked back.

With such experiences under my timing belt, I wasn’t shocked to learn this week that a survey shows nine in ten Scottish motorists do not trust mechanics. A third, meanwhile, believe they have been downright cheated. The survey, carried out by price comparison site Confused.com, also found 90% of us do not even expect mechanics to tell the truth.

Perhaps the most shocking statistic of all is that 62% of women drivers believe they are treated differently to men when they take their car to the garage.

Yes, poor Penelope Pitstop is still more likely to be seen as a soft target by the likes of Speedy, who relies on the ability to bamboozle with techno-babble.

That explains why 39% of women are worried they will be ripped off, compared with 27% of we-know-it-all blokes.

One of the biggest challenges when analysing a big bill is when your perfectly healthy pride and joy has undergone the dreaded MOT . . . and comes back a failure with list of repairs that would consign most cars to the celestial knackers yard.

In this nightmare scenario, I’ve found the best thing to do – after a quiet moment in the corner sobbing – is to ask to see the full fail report. This should show which repairs are actually necessary for a clean bill of health and those that are only advisory – meaning the car is perfectly roadworthy without having to remortgage your home.

They should, of course, be attended to – but perhaps in stages and after paydays!

Bear in mind, too, that the MOT will not cover the health of the engine, clutch or gears, so they should not appear in the report.

Of course, the very best way to avoid being conned at the garage is to find a mechanic you can trust. I’d advise against going with anyone who likes to be known as Speedy.

DOMINIC RYAN