Car recovery experiences

[Agent_zed]

Like some others have said its a bit of a luck of the draw. I personally like french cars as find them far more interesting than many others. Haven't had a problem with my peugeot in the past 5 years I've had it, other than a broken spring. But I know of many other people with broken springs due to potholes on all makes. My previous BMW had more issues, had 2 sets of rear springs, leaked oil which leaked fumes into the cabin, timing chain jumped a tooth, handbrake never held properly (shockingly poor design), airbag recall and eventually something wrong in the airbag system that I couldn't fix.

The VW transporters with dual mass clutches will cost you £2-3K for a replacement.

Buy what you like and hope you don't get a friday afternoon one.

 

[jetsetwilly]

My last breakdown was in Nov 2022, Discovery 4 snapped its crankshaft near Oban on a winter's night. Having my young son with me I decided to kill it properly getting to shelter, so we limped to the Green Welly and called RAC about 5 or 6pm. They didn't bother with a triage van. We were recovered about 7h later but only taken as far as Stirling where we were put in a hire car for the rest of the way - got back in the wee hours. Next morning the dead Disco was dropped at a local garage and the guy came and took the hire car away. Overall the service was about what I expected, but I did do quite a lot of calling during that 7h wait and the responses and case knowledge of the call centre folks were basically hopeless - felt like it was just a kind of Brownian motion that eventually got a recovery truck out to us, rather than any logical triage or routing process.

On a brighter note, once JLR had replaced their badly-designed engine (twice) and fleeced me of £10k for the privilege, I traded the D4 in for a Tesla, which hasn't missed a beat since. The Disco managed to break down again on the trip to the trade-in!