Comment: French garages can be a right pain in the derrière
Columnist Samantha David recounts her regular struggle to get her old banger moving
Some French garages offer a courtesy car while they do repair work,
Ally Foster/Shutterstock
Living in the French countryside, I am very dependent on my car.
I can walk round to the boulangerie and the bar, but that is about it. For anything else, I need my car keys.
However dependent I am, I do not think it is worth investing an arm and a leg in a car. Not when I am constantly reversing it clumsily into barn doors, scraping it against mounting blocks and spoiling the interior of it by transporting chickens on the back seat.
What would be the point of buying a beautiful new car, only to mess it up within months?
I do keep it reasonably clean, however. The hosepipe and the Hoover are no strangers to my old banger.
I think this helps when the police carry out their spot checks on drivers, something that happens increasingly often in our area since the war in Ukraine.
Needless to say, however, it is an old banger of a bagnole and spends a percentage of its life in the local garage while the mechanic pokes and prods.
“Mmmm, could be anything. Does it make the noise going uphill as well as down?”
“It’s worse in the summer...”
“Mmmm, and it smells funny, you say?”
Usually, the upshot is that they have to keep the car for several days, which I do not mind at all because the garage then lends me an even worse old banger for the duration. For free. Bliss.
At least if it blows up it won’t be my problem. All I have to do is replace the petrol I use.
So I was a bit shocked last week when I chugged to the garage to get the latest round of repairs done.
They had already done the ‘diagnostic’ (ie. spent two days working out what needed replacing) and this visit was to actually repair the wretched vehicle.
So I arrived there, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, only to find that the rules had changed.
“Two clients this month have crashed our free loan cars and refused to pay to mend them, so we are no longer lending cars to clients without all-risks insurance.” If you have all-risks insurance on your car, this extends to any car you drive on an occasional basis.
But, obviously, I do not have this. Not with my record of scrapes and dents. I just have the cheapest.
On the other hand, I have never bumped one of their cars. I have not even transported chickens in one.
They would not budge, though, so in the end I had to drive my wreck home sans repair.
Several days later, they came up with a new offer: if you deliver the car in the morning, we could drive you home and then return your car at the end of the day.
It would only be one day without a car. Ho hum. A right pain in the derrière. I am doing it this time, only because they already did the diagnostic. But next time I am changing garage to one that lends customers a free car whatever their insurance policy.
