One of the most fascinating aspects (to me!) of running a garage that doesn’t specialise in any particular make of car, is that we get to see a huge variety of different vehicles through our workshop every week.

After a while, you begin to see recurrent faults on similar cars, and often, when a customer phones up to describe a problem they’re having, I often know what it is before they’ve finished telling me!

Basically, most cars have some kind of known fault that happens regularly, and affects virtually all of similar age and type.  Here are a few really common examples of ‘everyday’ faults that we see one or other of almost every week:

  • Renault Clio and Megane wheel bearings are often really noisy.
  • BMW 318i engines often run badly on tickover because of a cracked plastic breather that sucks-in air and confuses the engine electronics and makes the yellow ‘check engine’ light come on.
  • Vauxhall Vectra and Astra 2.2 Petrol engines often have really rattly timing chains.
  • Vauxhall Corsa (2000>) and Meriva have useless gear linkages that wear out and stop them going into first and second gear without a struggle.
  • Volkswagen Passat (97>) leak water into the front passenger footwell because the drain hole for the pollen filter (under the bonnet) gets blocked up with leaves etc. and allows the water to spill into the car.
  • Ford Focus pollen filter seals (which cost £2) fail and leak water into the passenger footwell.
  • Volkswagen Polo’s and Seat Ibiza 1.4’s often stall when approaching roundabouts and junctions because of a worn and dirty ‘throttle body’ on the injection system.
  • Volkswagen Golf IV (1998-2004) centre exhaust mountings break and cause a clunking underneath when you pull away.
  • Fiat Punto rear suspension radius arm bearings wear out and fail the MOT
  • Renault Laguna II (2000 – 2006) rear suspension mounting bushes collapse and cause a huge clonking  noise underneath.
  • The same fault also affects VW Golf IV models from 1998 – 2004

These are just a few that I can remember off the top of my head, but there’s loads more! Now, what use is all this knowledge you may ask. Well, firstly it sure saves a lot of labour time diagnosing faults. Because we often know from experience what the fault is, we can fix it first time and at minimal cost. Quite often, customers have come to us with any one of the above problems, having already been to another garage that have changed loads of parts, yet the problem still remains. They always seem surprised when myself or James, the workshop manager explains what the problem is, and describe exactly the symptoms they’re having BEFORE even having looked at their cars!

In this industry, knowledge is power! Having a pretty good idea what the problem is already, saves our customers the labour cost of diagnosis, and us the wasted time of ‘barking up the wrong tree’ when trying to locate faults.

As newer and newer cars come through the workshop, our database of knowledge grows and grows with each new recurrent fault we diagnose and repair, and even if the next customer has a similar fault and we can’t remember exactly waht the cause was, we can look through our detailed computer records and see exactly what we did to fix a similar fault for a previous customer. Our superb Autowork software package that we use for invoicing and recording jobs, stores every detail of every job we’ve done since 1997 and a search by vehicle type takes a few seconds to recall.

So, when your car develops what you might think is a very peculiar problem, you can be assured that you’re not the first, and certainly won’t be the last! Hopefully, Mrs. Smith had the same problem a few weeks ago, and maybe it only cost £10 to fix as it was just a stupid plastic clip broken rather than the new gearbox you thought it might need!

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