Thats different to the normal MoT issues

[X5Sport]

Let’s hope that they have finally fixed it.

Several years ago now I refused to pay a £500 bill on my X5 as they had not actually found the problem and what they did do disabled the tracking device!  I had a furious argument with the Dealer Principal and refused to back down.  He could not argue his case because they hadn’t found the problem (poor starting) and I got the car back.  Trackstar had to come in and fix the tracker.  Another Dealer found the starter was faulty and replaced it under warranty for free!

I agree with your advice with warranties too.  The big problem is that car ‘technicians’ are now only taught to go by what the computer tells them meaning that the moment it can’t identify the fault they are stuck.  Jobs are all timeboxed to allow for ‘menu pricing’.

That then turns into a ‘let's throw parts at it until we fix it’ and you as the Customer have to pay for all the misdiagnosis and wrong parts.  With Dealers around me charging upwards of £200 per hour, that gets very expensive very quickly.

Engineers like me were all taught to work from first principles and not to rely on the tools for the answers.  The test kit is just a tool, programmed by a human with little idea of how the modules actually work as a ‘system’ and therefore doesn’t know whether their coding is picking up the problem.  All too often it doesn’t and our bank accounts suffer. 

It is this failure to understand system engineering as a whole that lets everyone downl  Software engineers understand software and hardware engineers hardware.  The challenge is keeping the big picture of how it all works together clear in the technical support resources minds.