Personally, I would be blocking the dealer's number. In situations such as these, the dealer, by virtue of the fact that it's his job, is assumed to be technically competent to inspect the vehicle and identify any issues he might like to use as bargaining tools before you begin negotiations with him. This dealer appears to have chosen not to do that, which is his problem, not yours. Provided you are a consumer, and not yourself a trader, you are not assumed to have any particular technical knowledge about the car. Although you would be required to point out, or at least not hide, any serious issues you were aware of, any else is for him to find. If I were you, I would ignore any further attempt to contact you by phone by blocking his number. If you ever receive anything in the mail from him, come back here with a suitably redacted photo of the letter and the regulars will tell you what action to take, if anything. Please don't worry about this.

An observation, if I may: Mini gearbox bolts are, from the factory, coated in a thread-locking compound that stops the bolts from unwinding in normal usage. If you're unsure, thread-lock is a thick liquid applied to the bolt thread before the bolt is tightened. After the bolt has been torqued, the compound hardens and acts as a sort of glue, stopping the bolt from unwinding. If you have had a bolt come loose, my initial suspicion is the garage has not reapplied fresh thread-lock compound on reassembly. You could test for this by having an independent mechanic remove another gearbox bolt and check for residue on the bolt thread. It'll be a blue, red, or pink residue. If you don't see it, or hardly any of it, I would suspect it hasn't been applied during reassembly, and this might provide you with an avenue to pursue in terms of demonstrating poor workmanship with the original repair.

You don't have to write to them at all; however, not doing so will result in your letter box filling with half the amazon rainforest in the hope they eventually get some money from you. Writing to them with the letter BankFodder suggested may put a stop to that right from the off. If you choose to ignore, you should continue to open any correspondence you get from them, just in case they ever did try to raise a claim against you. It would be easily defensible, you just don't want them to do it without your knowledge, which could result in a default judgement in their favour.

If you paid by bank transfer you would surely know about it, because you would have had to log in to your online banking to do so, or do it over the phone with the bank. The point I'm making is it would have to have been you who did that, the dealer couldn't make a bank transfer on your behalf...unless you did something unthinkable, like logged on to your bank via his computer? If you paid by him inserting your debit card into a payment device then you did indeed pay by debit card. Edit: I'm re-reading your post and see you weren't actually present. Still wasn't a bank transfer.

How is this any different to you, for example, driving your car on the road with no MOT or lapsed tax? It is presumably your responsibility to keep track of your affairs and ensure you pay things as they're due. In this instance, though I accept I'm far from an expert, I can't see how you could have a valid complaint. You did not have a valid permit and you were ticketed as a consequence. If you don't have a calendar, diary or similar, there are services available such as "don't forget the milk" that will remind you by notification and email when things of note fall due. Maybe something like that would benefit you. Edited to say: That position clearly changes if you are normally invoiced in advance, or possibly even if you're normally reminded in advance.

My worry here is that you're going to make posts on various help/advice sites until someone somewhere tells you that you should either; a) deal with it yourself, or b) ignore it all, because I get the distinct impression from reading this thread that you don't want to accept the advice you've been given. I hope I'm wrong, sincerely. The fact of the matter is, as has been said many times, you will make this situation considerably worse if you don't pass this on, or have your parents pass this on, to their insurer. I understand the desire to protect them and any associated anxiety they might be feeling, but that's a short-sighted view.

I'm sure there must be a reason for this, but as I don't think it's been asked, I'll ask now to satisfy my own curiosity if nothing else. If the carpark your car was in is private and only accessible via fob, then surely someone else in that apartment building must either be responsible themselves, or at the very least they must know the driver, even if they're not themselves aware of what happened? Are the spaces in the carpark numbered and assigned to individual apartments? If they are, could you not ask the security guys which space the car that hit yours was attempting to occupy, and then from that approach the apartment owner in the hope they might furnish you with the person's details?

@Martin244 - I'm just catching up with this thread after a time away, and it's wonderful news to see that things are now being sorted for you! If you think the advice you received here was valuable, maybe you would consider making a small contribution to the site. The whole site is run for free and by volunteers like the ones you engaged with here, particularly people like Bankfodder, DX, Honeybee etc. Any contributions make the costs of running the site that little bit easier to meet. If you feel like that's something you'd like to do, you can find the orange 'Donate' button by scrolling to the bottom of the page.

The two years is nothing to do with a probationary period Homer, it's the qualifying period before which an employee doesn't yet enjoy full employment rights. There are certain circumstances where the qualifying period doesn't apply and dismissal is automatically 'unfair'. Or, if the person involved has a protected characteristic under the Equality Act. If neither of those caveats apply then an employee can be dismissed within 2 years with no obligation on the employer to follow a disciplinary process. More information here: Employment Rights

Others will need to advise you on whether your husband should have been involved in the consultation process, and whether that has any bearing on what happens to him, but two things jump to mind immediately: 1. With less than 2 years service, an employer can normally dismiss an employee on the spot, with little or no justification required. 2. If his employer is using his handling of fuel cards as justification for dismissal, the fact that they don't really need justification with less than 2 years service notwithstanding, what does his contract or any published policies have to say about fuel cards and how they should be stored?

The bearings in your turbocharger are fed with a constant supply of high pressure oil that serves to both lubricate and cool the bearings. The oil is pumped into your turbo via either semi-rigid metal pipes - similar in appearance to brake pipes - or via braided flexible lines. The garage will certainly know where to look for these. There will be two of them; one is the feed line that brings fresh oil up from the pump, and a return line that takes excess oil back to your car's oil sump. I would ask the garage to draw a sample from both the feed and return line, which they can do by simply unbolting each line one after the other and letting the oil drain out before refitting it. The reason you want the sample to come from the turbo is because we suspect that's where the biggest concentration of debris will be now, if there is any. Your recent service will have replaced the oil in the sump, and the oil filter, both of which would have been our first port of call had that service not happened, but then you were in a catch 22. While that's happening, I would suggest it would be worthwhile spending a bit of time considering whether you want to have the turbocharger itself investigated and its cause of failure independently assessed. If you did that, you'd be hoping the engineer found either actual bearing debris in the oil system, or obvious bearing damage.

Your diagnostic report has a few different faults in it, but the one we're currently interested in is the code P0299 - Engine Underboost. As the name of the code suggests, that means your turbocharger is not providing the boost pressure it should do. In case you're not sure what a turbocharger is, it is in the simplest terms a shaft with an impeller on each end. One impeller sits in your engine's exhaust flow, and is turned by the force imparted by the exhaust gas leaving your engine after combustion. Because both impellers are attached to the same shaft, the exhaust impeller turning also turns the impeller that sits in your engine's air intake system. That impeller is responsible for compressing the air entering your engine above atmospheric pressure. That rise in pressure and air density means extra air and fuel can be squeezed into the engine's cylinders, providing a bigger bang and hence more power. That's ultra simplistic, and in fact it's a lot more complex than that, but it gives you a basic picture. The pressure the turbocharger achieves over atmospheric pressure (1 bar) varies by engine, but it'll be somewhere in the region of 1.3/1.5 bar). If something goes wrong with your turbo, for example, if the turbo bearings and contaminated and damaged (like we suspect they have been by engine bearing debris) then the turbo will not be able to spin freely. If it can't spin freely, a lot of that exhaust gas energy has to be used to overcome the excess drag or resistance, rather than being used to spin the compressor, and hence, the boost pressure produced by the turbo is reduced. If that boost pressure is reduced, your engine will detect that loss of boost. The loss of boost means your engine needs to restrict the amount of fuel being injected, it produces a lot less power, and if things get really bad, the engine will enter a 'limp mode' to protect itself. This is what has happened to your car. It seems to me almost certain that bearing material from your thrust bearings has caused your turbo bearings to fail through oil contamination, and as a result, your turbo cannot produce the boost it should, and hence the fault code P0299 has been recorded. In my view it's now crucial to your argument that you obtain these oil samples, and in fact I would now want an independent engineer to inspect and diagnose your turbocharger itself. The chain of events is quite clear in my mind (and I think I'm right), but we really must set about proving it. Your oil test and magnet experiment is the first port of call.

I see by looking at your invoice that a number of 'seals' have been replaced, but it's clear that although evidently Vauxhall's parts system refers to these as 'seals', many of them are in fact what would more commonly be referred to as 'gaskets'. I'm pretty certain what was replaced with your vacuum pump was in fact its gasket. If the pump was removed as part of the clutch replacement process (and remember, the clutch needed removed and refitted to the new engine, even if they didn't replace it, so they still need to effectively perform a clutch change as part of your engine change), even as part of a diagnostic process, they would be obliged to replace its gasket because these things are almost always single-use items. The same applies to the line that reads 'Turbocharger seal'. In order to fit your original exhaust and turbo to your new engine, they would have been obliged to use new gaskets for those, hence the lines in your invoice. Same with bolts etc. The bolts that attach your engine's flywheel to the crank shaft, and clutch to your flywheel, are also single-use, hence their presence on the invoice. I haven't seen anything on that, at first glance, I'll check in more detail later, that causes me any concern. In fact you could view it as reassuring that they're following the service procedure.

Hi Martin, No, the vacuum pump has no lubrication feed, at least not from your engine's main oil supply. It's lubrication is self-contained. The vacuum pump is normally responsible for evacuating the vacuum side of your brake servo, reducing the amount of pedal pressure you need to provide to make the brakes work effectively. In some cases, in cars with hydraulic clutches (rather than cable operated), the vacuum pump can also be responsible for a similar function there, reducing the amount of clutch pedal pressure you need to exert to disengage the clutch. I assume your vacuum pump was replaced as part of your engine/clutch change, as would be good practice.

Others like BankFodder or DX are better to advise you on what action you should take to chase people up, but I would suggest it will do you no harm to keep everyone up to date yourself. Personally, I would not rely on anyone else taking action for you. If I was in your position, and I'd managed to secure agreement that Vauxhall would replace the turbocharger at no cost to me, I would also want them to guarantee me that in the process of fitting it that they were going to flush out the oil feed and return pipework to the turbo. As I'm sure you now appreciate, you need to assume bearing material is now contaminating your engine's lubrication system, so simply replacing the major components doesn't address that issue. If I could agree a new turbo, and if they would flush the pipework while fitting it, then I would consider keeping the car, with one crucial caveat. I would want to know if the replacement engine, fitted as a result of the Technical Service Bulletin (TSB), contains updated parts to mitigate the same original failure from happening again, or else you could find you've been through all this hassle only for the original problem to come back in another x-thousand miles.