Dealer’s Diary

Steven looks at vehicle finance.

Pretty much as soon as I entered the motor trade, one of the lessons drummed into me regarded fault-finding. It was a mantra I repeated relentlessly when I was a warranty agent for a British manufacturer for dealers in the UK and Ireland. Remember Complaint, Cause & Correction? I always insisted on hearing a logical story before writing cheques to cover a material or manufacturing defect. It is a lesson worth repeating here.

In the same way that Occam’s razor states that you should never disregard the most obvious solution to any problem, you should always replace the cheapest suspect component first. A methodical approach is always necessary when diagnosing faults, as is an eye on the cost of replacement parts. Always use your brain and do not run headlong into making a big job of it. You should be thinking coolly and critically.

If you suspect the gearbox is noisy, replace a wheel bearing which feels rough when rotated. If you suspect an electric component is faulty, first check the earth and multi-plug connections. If you suspect a head gasket has failed, check the inlet manifold gasket and expansion tank cap. We would all rather pay for a replacement fuse or relay over, say, an aircon compressor or air suspension pump. You are not a fitter, you are a technician – or, rather, you’re being paid to be one.

The reason I’m covering this here is that the other day I heard about a Rolls-royce gearbox that had been removed and overhauled to cure a hesitant running issue when warm. I dread to think of the cost and effort involved in this repair, but the dealer stomached it under their warranty, as they’d not long sold it. It was returned to the customer, who found the issue was still there when he went back to using it. Eventually, the fault was correctly diagnosed as a generic in-tank fuel pump that was starting to seize up when hot and under load. You can hear them start to whine in less well-insulated cars.

Can you imagine the screams of despair when the correct diagnosis was made? All that profit and more gone for the sake of a bit of scoping out. Crazy, isn’t it?

As a technician, what would you replace? As a customer, what would you rather have pulled out of your car? As an accountant, what would you rather pay for?

So why does the motor trade – and we’re not alone in this, as I discovered when looking over a ship in a dry dock the other week – insist on in giving itself big bills, headaches and jobs for no good reason?

If that Roller had come before me as warranty agent, then I’d have been debiting the dealer’s bank account for the privilege of being too hasty. That was the one tool I had which really rammed home the message to dealers.

‘Faced with a fault, you should always replace the cheapest component first’