Posts Tagged ‘astra’

I took my car in for it’s MOT last Thursday.

It failed. I’ll give you a sentence to guess what it failed on. The answer is – the tyres on the rear axel were different sizes! These were tyres that Evans Halshaw put on fresh when I bought it from them last year and then put the car through an MOT before giving it to me!

As such I booked it into Evans Halshaw on Hunslet Road were I bought it from to get it fixed. No apology offered on their behalf but they did go as far as to replace the tyre – with another used one, they wouldn’t even give me a new tyre.

They also refused to fix the temperature gauge under warrenty because apparently “electrics aren’t covered.” This leaves me wondering exactly what is covered. Tyres, exhausts, etc fair enough but why aren’t electrics covered? They fixed my central locking, I can only presume this is actually gas powered?

In any case they didn’t get any money out of me, I took it up to Alba Tyres today to get it sorted as I didn’t fancy paying the £240 Evans Halshaw wanted to fix it.

Alba were happy to explain that I needed a whole new exhaust because it was actually corroded all the way down but amazingly this still came out almost £100 cheaper than Evans Halshaw.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want anyone to get cancer. But if someone has to…

I got woken up yesterday morning by Liz knocking on my door informing me the police were hear. Always a good way to start the day.

Turns out someone had been down the street doing over cars. They smashed my quarter light, realised my car was deadlocked so smashed the passenger side front window and got the stereo. Awesome.

Great time to find out that your car alarm doesn’t work. But Evans Halshaw assured me it has been through the full Network Q check thing, which shows how worthwhile that is (this is after they failed to notice my central locking didn’t work).

So yeah, turns out I’m £200 worse off than I thought I went to bed on Tuesday night. It seems somewhat futile to bother trying to save money or pay off overdrafts, I don’t seem to be getting anywhere.

The central locking is finally working again on my car!

It has been a bit of a mission though. I got a phone call from Evans Halshaw to inform me that the part that had been on order was finally in so I booked it in for a service to take place this morning. Phoned my dad up to see if he could give me a lift to work once I’d booked it in.

Turns out, he had his car booked in for a service at the same time.

I mean seriously, what are the odds? Let’s assume that the car goes in twice a year, that means his car is going in once every 150 days meaning that the probability is like 1%. Still, we worked in some kind of plan as he was picking up a curtesy car.

I was 15 minutes late down there because a lane of the inner ring road was closed off and there was an accident down near Hunslet road combining to some rather large queues. Then we had to navigate our way back to Evans Halshaw Nissan to drop my dad’s car in and finally get me to work. By the time I got to work I felt like I’d done a days work :P.

Having ordered my car on Friday and picking it up on Monday I really should get round to posting some pictures of it. It’s a 1.6 Astra, 2001, 50,000 miles so not the fastest thing in the world but never the less reasonably fancy. The air con actually works in it which is always a nice suprise with used cars.