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.

Testing your oil with that kit will be a good idea, but remember you're not really looking for chemical contamination, it's literally tiny bits of metal you're looking for. If you can obtain the sample, in addition to your test kit, I would suggest finding a reasonably strong magnet and leaving that magnet in a cup of oil overnight. Extract the magnet the next day and check for signs of metal on it.

If you can obtain a sample of oil, you will need to get in touch with someone like The Oil Lab (Google them). They will analyse your oil sample for contaminants and send you a report on its condition and what if anything they find mixed in with it. Your oil having been changed is the reason I suggested trying to obtain a sample directly from the turbocharger's oil feed and return pipework, there's more chance of contaminants still being there than in the sump oil. Either way, this is now a reasonably long shot because, as you suspect, a substantial amount of contaminated oil will have been flushed out with the oil change, but I would doubt all of it.

It doesn't seem either of those things really. I understand it's frustrating, but large companies move slowly (despite their own '3 days' statement) and these sorts of issues are dealt with by people who really don't care about you or me. If you end up getting your money back, either via the bank or via the vendor, you're not entitled to keep or dispose of their property on your own initiative. You may open yourself up to a claim of unjust enrichment if you do that. If you're going to take that approach, I would advise them in writing at their head office, recorded delivery, giving all relevant details to help them identify you and your order, that you will consider the item abandoned and subject to disposal if they do not make contact with you to make arrangements for collection within 14 days, and I would count that 14 days from the point at which you can confirm the letter is received by their head office. Frustrating as it is, I wouldn't say you can realistically try to hold them to a timeline you already know they won't meet.

My concern in relation to you keeping the car long term is as follows: For the original engine to have failed in the manner it did - excessive crank shaft end float - the engine bearings responsible for controlling that end float, called thrust bearings, need to have become worn to such an extent that excessive movement is possible. Those bearings are made from a blend of metals, and they're deliberately sacrificial in comparison to the crank shaft itself, meaning they are designed to wear instead of the crank. For those bearings to allow significant crank movement, a significant amount of that metallic bearing material must have been worn off. That bearing wear is in the form of fine metal particles, or even small shavings in extreme cases, and these particles are flushed out of the bearing with the engine's normal oil flow. Because these particles are so small, a substantial quantity of them don't stay in your engine's oil sump, instead they're flushed round and through the engine with the oil, and then end up deposited in places like your turbocharger. Being metal, these particles are highly abrasive, which can lead to premature failure of other bearings and seals, like your turbo has. If someone asked me to guess why your turbo failed, I would hazard a guess at the following course of events: 1. Your engine failed because the thrust bearings wore to such an extent that excessive crank shaft end float was possible. 2. The engine was replaced, but other ancillaries like your turbo were not. 3. Your turbocharger's lubrication oil galleries had accumulated a quantity of bearing material swarf. 4. After your new engine was installed, the worn bearing material in your turbo went to work on destroying its seals and bearings. 5. Your turbocharger fails in short order. I realise I'm speculating, but I would suggest (having seen this multiple times) that your turbo failing is not a separate issue, but rather a consequence of your original problem. If possible, you should try to obtain a sample of oil from your car's sump, or from the turbo itself, and have it tested for bearing contamination. If the oil supply is contaminated, that will enable you to tie its failure to that of the engine itself. Another test worth doing is removing the oil sump plug. Sump plugs are usually magnetic and designed to capture metal particles in the oil. They don't catch them all, but again, if you see any particles stuck to it, or even a 'silvery' colour to the oil, you can link the turbo failure to that of the engine itself. And so, if you keep the car, but the new engine's oil supply is already contaminated, you could be sitting on a time bomb waiting for something else to go.

It's probably worth expanding the scope of your plumber's investigation to rule out any water source coming from your flat or bathroom, rather than just your shower. Most plumbers I've come across in recent years have had a plumber's version of an endoscope they can use to look under floors, behind units etc without any significant degree of disruption. Personally, I would rather have that peace of mind before I attempted to take a firm position on the matter. In terms of billing the letting agent; if your plumber agrees that your flat is not responsible for the leak, and assuming you can obtain an address, why not ask the plumber to invoice the letting agent direct? He may not do it, but it might be worth asking.

I would be amazed if you're that lucky. ECU fault codes have criteria that must be met before the code is recorded, and criteria that must be met before the ECU fault light will illuminate. For example, in most cases the engine's ECU must experience a fault several times across several drive cycles before the light will come on. That happens to guard against a transient problem causing the light to come on. I suspect you'll find over the next few days that light will come right back.

Ah, so there's a known fault with this engine (indicated by the Technical Service Bulletin [TSB]) that causes excessive back and forth movement of the crankshaft (end float), which was causing clutch problems, and so you needed the new engine to resolve the end float problem, which in so-doing would resolve the clutch issue. Got it. However, I still think the lack of proper servicing, or at least the lack of evidence of it, is going to be a problem. It would be worth checking whether their systems have evidence of the car being serviced, hence the full history on the advert, and it's not just the book that hasn't been stamped. It might be worth calling in to Evans Halshaw and asking them if they have any service history on file for the car.

Some further thoughts: Modern vehicles are very sensitive to the quality of oil used and adherence to specified service intervals. Although your vehicle is low mileage, it is over 3 years old, which would mean it should have been serviced several times by now. Does your service documentation include stamps to indicate this has been done? If not, that's all the garage will need to avoid this claim. Something doesn't quite make sense to me here. I don't understand why a car having trouble engaging 1st or 2nd gear would need a new engine. Trouble engaging gears would normally indicate either a clutch or gearbox issue, not an engine issue. Is the OP certain the engine was replaced, and not the clutch or gearbox? I think that needs confirmed. Also, if the engine was replaced, I would doubt the turbocharger was. When engines are replaced they're normally replaced as 'tall' or 'short' engines, which means they include the block and cylinder head (tall) or just the block (short). In either case, the accessories and ancillaries, like the turbo, alternator etc, would not be included and would be reused from the old engine. So even if the engine was new, the turbo would likely still be 3 years old. Still too young to have failed though, assuming all servicing was done properly.

Ok, so not a credit card as per your original thread. Fingers crossed chargeback works out for you, it sounds like dreadful customer service.

You know far more about this than I do @dx100uk, but the OP originally told us they provided their credit card information for payment. If that is the case, and it's not a Visa Debit card, the correct route would be Section 75 rather than chargeback?