Mechanic broke my car - Now refuses to pay

mikey72

Sorry,
you wanted advice, you don't like it, fair enough.
You lost me at the "I have an expensive car, not a Ford Fiesta" as well. If it's such an expensive car, use a main dealer, at that price it must still be under warranty.

w.dws

If your talking about £80k of range rover why try and get it fixed on the cheap by a bloke in a van who puts an ad in the local rag or on google businesses? Still can't see that part taking 5.2hrs to change what is it 7 bolts?

dan_uk_1984

I give up with you lot & this site.

Thanks to those who replied back with help and informative posts, it's a shame everyone on here can't be like you.

DirectDebacle

You are quite reasonable in feeling outraged at this appalling lack of customer care and workmanship. I am surprised at how reasonable you have been with him and not particularly surprised at his stupidity in refusing to recompense you for your inconvenience and expense.

If he had any customer care skills then this should have been his initial response:

As to the fact he made a temporary repair, and said he would could back in a week to fix it, (or couldn't come back for a week), if you had told him it failed he could have cancelled a non urgent job, shuffled them all round, or just come in the evening and worked late. He could even have told you to take it to a garage himself.

He has shown himself unable to change a vacuum hose without causing damage to your vehicle and unwilling to make any effort to repair that damage as soon as was practicable. He attempted to make a temporary repair which should have been effective for the time (1 week) he was unable to do the correct repair. I doubt he actually believed gluing engine parts back together would last a week anyway.

He expected you to be without your vehicle for a week and presumably take a weeks paid or unpaid leave or lose your job.

Now he is complaining that you didn't tell him the temporary repair failed. Why should you? You knew it couldn't be repaired by him for a week. He would have told you that your glue he borrowed was no good and to buy some more and re-glue it.

You are probably no more than a Sat. morning beer money customer and he couldn't care less whether he works for you again or not.

Send Mr. Clumsy a letter before action claiming every penny this has cost you. If he has not settled to your satisfaction within 7 or 14 days take him to court.

mikey72

The car wasn't actually fixed until Friday though, so it was still a week later.

DirectDebacle

mikey72 wrote: »

The car wasn't actually fixed until Friday though, so it was still a week later.

That isn't the point. If he hadn't damaged the vehicle in the first place it wouldn't have needed repairing. If the OP was without the vehicle for a week because of Mr. Clumsy' hamfistedness then the OP simply adds the cost of this further inceonvenience to his claim.

gilbert_and_sullivan

Court is all very well DD, it's getting unscrupulous grease monkey to honour a judgement that's going to be the problem.
So far the attitude shown by him strikes me as about as honourable as a politician.

I really hope you are right and he gets judgement, whether he gets any satisfaction or more importantly some of his expenses back from pursuing this creature is another thing all together.

mikey72

DirectDebacle wrote: »

That isn't the point. If he hadn't damaged the vehicle in the first place it wouldn't have needed repairing. If the OP was without the vehicle for a week because of Mr. Clumsy' hamfistedness then the OP simply adds the cost of this further inceonvenience to his claim.

Now the op has edited his post to remove the dates, as he originally said it lasted to Monday or Tuesday, then was finally fixed by Friday, the mechanic can justifiably argue he could have fixed it the following day if he had been informed.
The op can claim his alternative expenses for maybe one day.
The mechanic would have bought trade, and even if labour is awarded, there is a good chance it would be at the mechanics rates, as that is what he would be using to repair.
So maybe half of the op's overall cost, and the cost of the lid.
It all depends on the judge though, could be all the costs, or nothing, as the op never gave him a chance to put it right, or even told him there was a continuing problem.

(Must admit though, I'd be gutted if I had done it, and would have put it right the next day, so I'm not agreeing with the mechanic here either, maybe he had a few non-runners he had to fix that week, and while he left this one running didn't give it priority, but then could have changed that from a call from the op)

dan_uk_1984

mikey72 wrote: »

Now the op has edited his post to remove the dates

No I didn't. There is no "Last Edited By" tag on the bottom.

The glue held for 1 day, by Tuesday the glue had failed

vaio

dan_uk_1984 wrote: »

No I didn't. There is no "Last Edited By" tag on the bottom.

The glue held for 1 day, by Tuesday the glue had failed

I don’t remember seeing the repair days either, out of interest when was it repaired?

dan_uk_1984 wrote: »

I give up with you lot & this site.

Thanks to those who replied back with help and informative posts, it's a shame everyone on here can't be like you.

Don’t throw your toys out of the pram, he broke your car by being ham fisted and, based on what you have said, I think you’ll win and get all your costs if you take it to court.

The reason the mechanic is trying it on is because, as you can see from some of the posts on here, a certain % of punters will just accept the treatment he hands out or have the wrong idea about the remedies you have available.

It’s a forum with the motto “consumers revenge”, if people knew their rights then there would be no need for the forum to educate them.