On top of all the other “little” issues over the last few weeks (and I will get back to my mother's progress in another post) my car has been giving me considerable grief.
It started on Friday 18th January as I was driving to Charleroi to join the BMPH3 for a “Trust Us” Weekend. There I was in my beloved slightly long in the tooth, Shaguar (Jaguar S-Type) in medium traffic in the pouring rain in the fast lane doing about 125kmph when suddenly an alarm message came up “Traction Control Failure” and the engine cut!
I remained remarkably calm considering and got to the hard shoulder without any mishap. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t got the first idea what to do next. I didn’t know where I was, except on a motorway (but which one) somewhere near Charleroi. I phoned my friend Eric who was also driving to Charleroi for the same flight. He somehow managed to find me and a tow truck and managed to get the whole thing sorted and give me a lift to the airport in time for the flight (to Dublin as it turned out).
As we waited on the hard shoulder something very strange happened to the car. The steering wheel seemed to become disconnected from the wheels and could be spun round and round and round! There was no way of steering the car. It made loading the car a little more complicated than usual as I hadn’t stopped with my wheels facing directly forwards, but somehow we managed it. Thank god that the on-board computer spotted the problem and managed to alert me before I lost control. The idea of hurtling along at 75mph without steering makes my blood run cold.
The whole thing was very traumatic for me particularly as I had just had some bad news on the phone minutes before the breakdown about my mother. Nevertheless I did my best to forget my worries about the car and my mother for the weekend and by the time I got back from Dublin on Sunday evening I had a plan…
I hired a car from Hertz at Charleroi airport and that night checked the internet for the nearest Jaguar dealer to the garage that had retrieved my car from the motorway. There turned out to be a dealer in Waterloo, some 20kms from the breakdown garage. I phoned them on Monday morning and they agreed to retrieve the car and pay the €100 recovery fee. That evening I got a call to go and see them to sign some papers and to pay the bill. I was surprised that the recovery fee had mushroomed to €360, but paid up all the same as they had got me out of a hole.
The garage man explained that the man who does the estimates was on holiday so they wouldn’t be able to give me an estimate until tomorrow – in fact it was Thursday I received the bombshell.
On Wednesday a fellow hasher had said “I hope they don’t stiff you with a massive bill – what if it is huge like €2,500?” I laughed thinking that was highly unlikely, so when I got the phone call late on Thursday evening to say that the car needed a new power steering unit and it would cost between €4000 and €5000 (£3000 to £3750) to fix I almost passed out. I told the man I needed time to think and would give him the go/no go on Monday.
I was flummoxed and panicked on Thursday night, but on Friday I got my act together. I phoned my excellent Jag man back in the UK – Stewart at XJ Engineering in, ironically enough, Bentley. He said “They are having a laugh” and gave a rough estimate of around £1000 for the repair. He suggested I phoned the Jaguar dealer in Farnham and ask them for the cost of replacing the Power Steering Rack in my car. They instantly quoted £1208.52 including parts, labour and VAT for the work.
So the people in Waterloo seemed to be using my predicament to their advantage.
I phoned a whole load of people to try to work out what to do next. The AA and Jaguar both couldn’t help me as I wasn’t actually insured with either of them (a big mistake) for the trip abroad, but after a lot of phoning around with both organisations I found helpful knowledgeable people who gave me some idea of my options. I was given the names of two separate companies that they would use to recover the car if I had had insurance with them. I phoned both and got quotes of between £550 and £750 for the repatriation of the car to XJ Engineering in Bentley.
So I could get the car from Waterloo to Bentley and repaired for less than half the cost of having it fixed in Waterloo.
I needed the weekend to think of a plan “B” but nothing came to mind, so on Monday morning I told the garage in Waterloo that I wouldn’t be requiring its services and gave the go-ahead to the cheaper of the two recovery firms. The problem was they don’t take credit cards, so I had to do a bank transfer, and I only managed to get that done on the internet after close of business on Monday and it takes 3 to 4 working days for the money to go through…
Yesterday (Monday) I heard from the recovery company that they had got the money and would be picking up the car sometime this week. So it will get to XJ Engineering sometime next week; over 3 weeks since the breakdown
In the mean time I am racking up a fortune in hire car charges as I need a car to get from central Brussels where I am staying once again out to Louven where I am now working.
Watch this space for further updates…
It started on Friday 18th January as I was driving to Charleroi to join the BMPH3 for a “Trust Us” Weekend. There I was in my beloved slightly long in the tooth, Shaguar (Jaguar S-Type) in medium traffic in the pouring rain in the fast lane doing about 125kmph when suddenly an alarm message came up “Traction Control Failure” and the engine cut!
I remained remarkably calm considering and got to the hard shoulder without any mishap. Then it occurred to me that I hadn’t got the first idea what to do next. I didn’t know where I was, except on a motorway (but which one) somewhere near Charleroi. I phoned my friend Eric who was also driving to Charleroi for the same flight. He somehow managed to find me and a tow truck and managed to get the whole thing sorted and give me a lift to the airport in time for the flight (to Dublin as it turned out).
As we waited on the hard shoulder something very strange happened to the car. The steering wheel seemed to become disconnected from the wheels and could be spun round and round and round! There was no way of steering the car. It made loading the car a little more complicated than usual as I hadn’t stopped with my wheels facing directly forwards, but somehow we managed it. Thank god that the on-board computer spotted the problem and managed to alert me before I lost control. The idea of hurtling along at 75mph without steering makes my blood run cold.
The whole thing was very traumatic for me particularly as I had just had some bad news on the phone minutes before the breakdown about my mother. Nevertheless I did my best to forget my worries about the car and my mother for the weekend and by the time I got back from Dublin on Sunday evening I had a plan…
I hired a car from Hertz at Charleroi airport and that night checked the internet for the nearest Jaguar dealer to the garage that had retrieved my car from the motorway. There turned out to be a dealer in Waterloo, some 20kms from the breakdown garage. I phoned them on Monday morning and they agreed to retrieve the car and pay the €100 recovery fee. That evening I got a call to go and see them to sign some papers and to pay the bill. I was surprised that the recovery fee had mushroomed to €360, but paid up all the same as they had got me out of a hole.
The garage man explained that the man who does the estimates was on holiday so they wouldn’t be able to give me an estimate until tomorrow – in fact it was Thursday I received the bombshell.
On Wednesday a fellow hasher had said “I hope they don’t stiff you with a massive bill – what if it is huge like €2,500?” I laughed thinking that was highly unlikely, so when I got the phone call late on Thursday evening to say that the car needed a new power steering unit and it would cost between €4000 and €5000 (£3000 to £3750) to fix I almost passed out. I told the man I needed time to think and would give him the go/no go on Monday.
I was flummoxed and panicked on Thursday night, but on Friday I got my act together. I phoned my excellent Jag man back in the UK – Stewart at XJ Engineering in, ironically enough, Bentley. He said “They are having a laugh” and gave a rough estimate of around £1000 for the repair. He suggested I phoned the Jaguar dealer in Farnham and ask them for the cost of replacing the Power Steering Rack in my car. They instantly quoted £1208.52 including parts, labour and VAT for the work.
So the people in Waterloo seemed to be using my predicament to their advantage.
I phoned a whole load of people to try to work out what to do next. The AA and Jaguar both couldn’t help me as I wasn’t actually insured with either of them (a big mistake) for the trip abroad, but after a lot of phoning around with both organisations I found helpful knowledgeable people who gave me some idea of my options. I was given the names of two separate companies that they would use to recover the car if I had had insurance with them. I phoned both and got quotes of between £550 and £750 for the repatriation of the car to XJ Engineering in Bentley.
So I could get the car from Waterloo to Bentley and repaired for less than half the cost of having it fixed in Waterloo.
I needed the weekend to think of a plan “B” but nothing came to mind, so on Monday morning I told the garage in Waterloo that I wouldn’t be requiring its services and gave the go-ahead to the cheaper of the two recovery firms. The problem was they don’t take credit cards, so I had to do a bank transfer, and I only managed to get that done on the internet after close of business on Monday and it takes 3 to 4 working days for the money to go through…
Yesterday (Monday) I heard from the recovery company that they had got the money and would be picking up the car sometime this week. So it will get to XJ Engineering sometime next week; over 3 weeks since the breakdown
In the mean time I am racking up a fortune in hire car charges as I need a car to get from central Brussels where I am staying once again out to Louven where I am now working.
Watch this space for further updates…
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