Indi9xx
New member
I think Shark was probably being just a little more honest than people would like to give an accurate example of what he sees in his day to day work. Lets face it, if you were buying a replacement car, when you take your old one to the dealer for a trade in, would you tell him about every stone chip, blister of rust, a clonk the suspension makes only on the left hand side, only when you hit a pot hole and only when the car is cold? Or would you just play ignorant with the attitude that you are taking the car to get shot of it and if this guy is calling himself a professional he needs to find the faults for himself? I think most people would take the second attitude, which would mean that most of the cars seen by car dealers would be in a poor state that the customer had said was "mint", but when he sells that same customer a car he will be coming back like a lightening bolt as soon as he finds so much as a sign of wear on a brake disk... That is going to leave anyone with an attitude that either many of the general public are crooks out to defraud him, or they are generally mechanically ignorant. No one here should take that personally, I bet most doctors get annoyed with people saying they feel ill and have a bad chest, yet they smell of fags... its the same kind of thing. My pet peeve is telling people that their brakes are shot to bits, worn down bellow minimum tolerance and the slider plates have lifted and therefore their brakes are not working as they should, who then tell me that this can't be true as the car passed an MOT last week.... Well, it is not a surprise they passed an MOT last week because the specification for an MOT pass was set in 1965 and are based on the weight of the car, which means a 944 Turbo will be judged against the minimum performance of a 1965 Ford Zephyr, A minimum performance which had to allow for the Ford Zephyr having pretty damn poor versions of drum brakes otherwise they would not have been able to pass the MOT with half worn brake shoes.. A ford Zephyr which also had a maximum speed of 80mph and even when new would have taken a couple of miles to come to a stop from that 80mph, rather than a Porsche able to go 160mph which may be trying to avoid a 2010 ford focus which is making an emergency stop and could currently out brake their Porsche with dodgy brakes.. But it is hard to keep your cool in the face of this when you have to explain that ten times a week to people who think you must be a crooked garage trying to con them into having work performed on their brakes. Every profession has bad aspects of customers that can grind you down over time, for me the people who are prepared to listen make it worth it, but I expect a used car dealer rarely gets the chance to get that far along the customer relationship building process, as this time they will be buying what you have in stock and next time they want a car they will probably want something you don't have. I'd never make a decent car dealer, I would go bust in no time, I panic about every detail on a car if I am selling it, I have the attitude that as a Porsche specialist I absolutely can not pleed ignorance to any fault, no matter how small a detail, that silver lux is about to get a new blower knob because the current one is loose.. not falling off loose, but my paranoid brain looks at this knob and thinks I can imagine some really anal buyer might bring the car back, ranting and raving about it, being on a snagging list of ten items with things as trivial as this knob, so off it comes and on goes a new one which is on its way from Germany for about £16... Then I look at a ball joint boot on the front wishbone and think to myself, I bet that has not been changed in years and I bet it will split through age as soon as the buyer takes it to another specialist, who you just know would like to find fault with one of my cars.. On a brighter note, its not long till spring and everything will be much brighter and we can all hoon around in our cars and looking down our noses at those Boxster owners who used to look down their noses at 944 owners! lol
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