UK-POLOS.NET - THE VW Polo Forum

Thought I'd share my recent experience for everyone's benefit:

My Mothers Polo 9N is due its second 'variable' service plus the BFC, Coolant and MOT all at the same time this year. As the car is under the VW Extended Warranty, we are obliged to have it serviced by VW Main Agent. Here is the costing they gave me, after much teeth sucking and repeatedly saying that this is the major service:

Parts - £157.90
Labour - £207.58
(Oil charged @ £17 p/L)

BFC - £70
MOT - £53.10
Coolant - £60

Total Cost: £548.58 (good news though includes VAT @ 15%)

Now I know full well that VW have 'Service Price Match' guarantee (http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/owners/offers/price-promise) that they have been running for quite some time now and it seems pretty good. I really didn't care what they quoted me for the service as I was always going to hammer them under the terms of this guarantee of theirs to a more reasonable figure. I just played dumb during the conversation and proceeded to book the car in.

I popped down to my local VW Indy (there are a couple here in MK) and got a quote from my preferred garage - total cost £240 (all inc.) for the same service. Long story short, Gayside MK matched to the penny the quote after a little grumbling - but by the terms of the price match they are stuffed.

My advice to anyone here who may be in the same position is to use this guarantee to your advantage.

Just as an aside, I tend to change the oil/filter in my Mothers Polo every 12 months (genuine filter and Castrol Edge 5W30 507.00 approved) - so although on paper the car will go 2 years between services it will always have fresh oil. Personally I don't like/trust/believe in these extended service intervals...

And just in case anyone is wondering, Costco were selling 3x 1L packs of the Edge stuff for £11 up until recently - so I stocked up With such oil at such low price - why use ahything else?

Well, Mothers car went to VW Wayside for its SECOND VARIABLE INSPECTION SERVICE. Booked in at the appointed hour, checked, double-checked and then re-verified what work needed doing before handing over the keys. Get called @ 3:30PM car is ready - great I think. Get there, it is cleaned and prepared very well. Look to check paperwork and pay only to find the monkeys have changed the oil/filter and conducted the MOT.

At this point I had two choices: Rip 'em a new one or play it calm and polite. I am now at the age where I prefer the latter, so I kept my cool and politely suggested to them that Houston, we have a problem. To be fair to them, they admitted they got it wrong within a few minutes of rustling paper and digging out of the original paperwork; and after profuse apologies, they proposed to 'make it right' by keeping the car overnight to work on it first thing the following day and have it prep'd and ready ASAP. I made it clear to them I expected full and proper compensation for my lost time, inconvenience and annoyance - so @ £240 for the second variable, I will settle for anything between £100 - £50 off

I am never surprised by the sheer incompetence of VW Milton Keynes. It is a very good job that I expect them to screw up that I then double-check the work. I mean you couldn't script this stuff up. Good job really as not only does the car get the necessary service, but it gets the all so necessary service stamp (keeps the extended VW Warranty people happy) but I get it for much less than anywhere else Moral of the story, if all VW Dealers are as incompetent as these people, surviving the credit crunch should be so much easier

personally i think there price promise as they call it is a load of crap! they want a written quote from the garage which is doing the work, getting a garage to do a written quote would start the alram bells ringing, and most of them would not give a written quote anyway in my experiance and also the garage that are doing the work has to be in 5 miles on the vw agent! and lets be honest 5 miles aint very far! Rant over! lol

Hope you get yours all sorted to your satisfactory

Well, I would tend to agree with you. But the price promise isn't that complicated to get compliance as I have just proved.

Well worth a try IMHO.

£157.90 on Parts?! What were they changing exactly?!

Being someone that believes that there is never a free lunch, I think that since the credit crunch, these car dealers are looking towards their service departments to make up for the cash lost in new/used car sales. This unfortunately translates into "bargain" deals on servicing and repair that end up costing a bit more than they should. VAG has been guilty of doing this from before the credit crunch though, when my Passat was in getting its MOT in May/June, I asked to to carry out a system check and clean - fixed price deal - but the pollen filter was extra and quite expensive - I turned down the pollen filter option as I use alternative filters, but I did ask them, while they had the refigerant out of the system, to change a leaking seal - I even identified it! What I paid for was more than the fixed deal + extra for refigerant + "no leak found". So all in all a really bad deal for me considering a limited quantity of refrigerant cost was built into the "deal" and I was charged for a complete system charge weight! So what did I do - nothing, VAG = 1 customer = 0 they are just so incompetant and I was thrilled with passing another MOT so kind of happily went on my way!! What a mug - VAG dealers did not get to where they are today by playing fair - I avoid them when I can - smooth talking assassins seem to be employed in their publicity department. As for the comment about spares prices - ah you see they have to meet their sales targets - don't they?

Tim_GTi wrote:£157.90 on Parts?! What were they changing exactly?!

Well this is the second variable - which means:

3.2L of oil
Oil Filter (1)
Spark Plugs (4)
Air Filter
Pollen Filter

And a whole bunch of checks no doubt that inflates the service time and as it also needs an MOT - duplciates much of the work - not they actually do everything but certainly like to charge for it! I personally don't care for VW Main Dealers at all, as my experiecne ehre has shown, I expect and anticipate they will screw up - and they do not fail to disappoint

At the end of the day, I got a major service (second variable ) completed, got them to price match (£240) and got a further £80 off 'for the inconvenience and as a goodwill gesture' - so all in all I am very satisfied in having to pay £160 (which includes the price of the MOT). How can anyone suggest the Price Promise is a 'con' when I have just proved it works?

My next project will be the timing belt + water pump. Anyone care to guess who will be doing that job and at what price?

What?!
If you bought it all yourself it's likely to cost:

Oil - £20
Oil filter - £5
Spark Plugs - £20
Air Filter £7
Poillen Filter £9

So around £60-65. And those are pretty generous price tags. So VW tried to charge you three times the amount for the parts?!

it is VW tim. if you dont complain they get away with charging that price.

it's just unfortunate that some people actually pay full whack for it!

Tim_GTi wrote:it's just unfortunate that some people actually pay full whack for it!

Can you imagine, they wanted circa £550 for this work originally? It is absolutely outrageous that they can justify charging that for any type of service on a _VW_ - but in a free market is it outrageous to charge what the market is willing to pay? I think not, so good luck to VW for charging insane prices - a fool is easily parted from his money, I guess there must be a fair few fools out there!

VW have a price match policy - so let them price match. My Mother's car is under [extended] VW Warranty, thereby she is obliged to have it serviced by a franchised dealership. I'll be damned if I'll let her pay £550 for the work...

I'd be surprised nowadays if VAG changed the plugs at this time/miles. I thought the wording for plugs was to examine, which means removing only one I'd guess - that's not to say that personally, I always change the plugs at 3 years/30,000 miles. Cars just don't eat spark plugs like they used to - if they are running okay. Ford suggested that 90,000miles was the right sort of service period for the plugs on the early Zetec engines. One area where money can easily be saved even if you are using the VW dealer, is to buy the "proper" oil in a 4 or 5 litre container from that dealer and hand it in along with the sales receipt with the car - they don't like that one much! Point is, most if not all main dealers have contracts with major oil companies to supply them with oil in bulk form - ie dispensed from a road tanker into some thing like a 500 litre storage tank. By doing this they can drop the litre unit cost down to something like £1.50, they then sell it on to you at some thing like £8.50 a litre - which probably matches their selling price of pre-packaged oil of a similar quality. That is the bit that really annoys me - that really is having a laugh!

RUM4MO wrote:I'd be surprised nowadays if VAG changed the plugs at this time/miles.

I completely agree with you that plugs should not need changing as often as they used to in the past. However the 40K/4 Year or Second Variable [Inspection] Service stipulates plug change and IIRC this has always been part of VWs servicing schedule. In this case, the breakdown of costs on the invoice clearly shows that 4x plugs were changed. I would have thought that VW would have left plug change until the 60k service - like many other manufacturers - but this does seem to be an early change point. The only thing I can think of is that these are not Long Life/Iridium plugs? As ridiculous as it may sound, I would have thought VW would use these types as standard! But seeing as they can't seem to make a belt/tensioner last for more than 4YRS/40K this doesn't surprise me. Good job not everything in life is like a VW

I've a funny feeling that the standard plugs fitted to "UK" build VAG cars is listed as "long life" in my copy of ETOS - ie are NGK - the BERU option is not listed as "long life". Another strange point, my daughter has an early 2002 Ibiza 6K (older model) with an 1.4 8V AUD 60PS engine - and its fitted with probably the most expensive NGK plugs that you can buy in Halfords etc - where as my wife's 2003MY Polo with a 1.4 16V BBY 75PS engine uses normal (but listed in at ETOS as "long life") NGK plugs. How strange as the VW has the variable service (20K/2years) enabled but the Seat is stricly fixed servicing. The only thing that I can think off is that VW want the first and third services to be "cheap" and the second and fourth to the "big ones" - so that would leave changing the plugs until 80K/4years if they were left out of the first big service. I'm sure they know what they are doing (?). I remember my Ford dealer being concerned when I went in and asked for a set of plugs for a Zetec engine when it had only done 30K - at that time that engine was not out for long enough for many to have reached the 90K mark which was when Ford thought they should be changed - after a long discussion they agreed to try to order them in!!