Garage owner forced to pay £11,150 following trading standards sting

[Mike Ruff, GW editor]

The owner of an independent garage in Warwickshire has been fined £1,500, ordered to pay prosecution costs of £9,500 and a £150 victim surcharge follo
[See the full post at: Garage owner forced to pay £11,150 following trading standards sting]

[graham cox]

halfords and kwick fit do this on a daily basis are they going to get fined??

[Dougal]

Of course we do not know which service was requested or which service was charged for.
But some of these items would have been in any service.

Every case like this is bad news for us all !

[blue]

I work for a company that maintains a blue light fleet, we have gone from a 8 week safety inspection cycle to a 6 month cycle. Unfortunately safety now comes 2nd to availability and nobody cares its astonishing how they get away with it.

[Steve J]

as an independent excersise ive just looked at a typical run of the mill vehicle on Autodata service schedules (i choose a 13 plate Hyundai i20) to see what theyre version of checkable items are applicable at service intervals, firstly i looked at the first 4 service checklists and not once did it mention that a seat belt reciever is a checkable item.
seat belts are checked for MOT purposes and not service items (certainly on the above vehicle) ive not checked any other vehicle.
its just another example of words beating practicality.
obviously the other missed items should have been noted.

s

[Paul Taylor]

Call me a fossil but I came from an era when you had carbs and points you serviced your car twice a year summer and winter service items/fluids were changed/checked yearly as they were not that reliable things rusted and quite often fell off but you knew what you was doing. With today’s cars and technology it is a virtual mine field of variables of time related intervals, long life this and that, special oils and procedures, no 2 cars are the same and customers have access to information and will soon tell you if you have spent to long or charged to much for their car. They don’t want to know you have charged an extra 1/2 hour checking things that are not on the list making sure it is safe. What is the correct service for a car? most small one man band’ers can afford to have access to this info plus the yearly updates and the diagnostics m/c to go with it. If you have not serviced it from new that is the only way to know it has been done to manufactures specs and corners have not been cut. All cars are different how can you have a set service working from a set service schedule usually comprising of a main and interim service There are to many back street cowboys out there giving the trade a bad name it we already have an up hill struggle it needs regulation.

[Paul baldwin]

Maybe an answer is to regulate the industry I have seen up selling by Halfords and kwikfit plus main dealers that is totally unnecessary

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