02 Aug 07
Now I'm no Luddite - I work on a website, after all - but I do dislike this trend for centralised phone operators. The Summit Group that owns Dees has one of these systems, which you have to use to book your car in for a service.
Thankfully it has a human being on the end of it, rather than one of the cinema-style automatons, but taking the booking of work out of the service department still means that the operator only has a computer to rely on, rather than the first-hand information that would come from actually working in the dealership.
Telephone booking completed, however, I took the S-Max in at the appointed time to have the valve replaced. A mechanic took the car and I parked myself on a sofa to wait. And wait.
Three-quarters of an hour later, the service representative came and apologised for the time it was taking, but they were trying to reprogram the tyre pressure monitor software. It shouldn't be too long now.
Another 30 minutes later it was ready. Well, almost.
Replacing the actual valve probably took about 10 minutes, but the rest of the time was spent trying to sort out the sophisticated computing that modern cars increasingly rely on. What the service department didn't realise for another hour or so, however, was that the computer is so sophisticated, they don't have to do anything. When a new tyre pressure sensor is fitted to the car, its unique identification code, contained in the data it transmits to the car, is 'learned' by the vehicle's computer after it's been driven at a speed of more than 12.5mph for 15 minutes (which takes a while in south-west London).
