Modern life is crap …

Sat in my new Audi – which is brand new and hasn’t moved much during lockdown – I finally have need to use the sat nav system. It takes a little bit of time to work it out, as even though I’ve had this model of car before – Audi have seen fit to change everything. This comes as a surprise to me as it is a well-known fact that drivers of a certain age buy the same model of car …. mainly because they know how the buttons work.

Back to the point.

I type into the keyboard ‘G’ – the voice system says ‘R’ ….I laugh jovially thinking …’silly me, I’ve miss typed’ – so I re hit the ‘G’ (harder this time obviously) – the voice system says ‘R’.

The car offers to let me use the scribble pad where you can free hand write the letters rather than typing. So being a ‘modern man’ I go for it. I artistically scribe ‘G’….you guessed it the voice system says ‘R’ – ‘destination approved – Royton, Oldham is your destination …..

Aaaarrrrgggghhhhhh noooooo, fucking Royton is the centre of the latest COVID outbreak, you stupid bloody car.

I then noticed that the approved speed limit shown on my heads up display is ‘70mph’, which given that I am in the centre of `Glossop in a pedestrian area seems a little excessive….however, I hit the approved speed in about 3.6 seconds then spent the next half hour explaining to the police officer that it was my cars fault not me.

By this time, I’ve realised that something is amiss with the brand-new car….so I ring Audi.

After being passed from recorded message to recorded message, I finally get through to service, who tell me that the earliest they can see my car is…. in six weeks.

Now, I’m pretty sure I can get by without sat nav for six weeks – and given that I will be going at 70mph everywhere I go… it will fly by….but ….dear reader….where has customer service gone in today’s world?

Yes, I know about bloody COVID but this isn’t COVID related – this is just a big car manufacturer keen to ‘sell sell sell’ and not having the wherewithal to offer a decent aftercare service.

Anyway, it occurred to me that I do actually have another car (swanky eh?) – so I decide to use the alternate vehicle for my next journey. I jump in, start the car, set off …within five minutes I’m sweating profusely as warm air is being wafted onto me from every angle.

I stopped and rang up the dealer telling them that the air conditioning seems to have failed. Their first offer of a solution was… ‘have you tried turning the air conditioning on sir…’

After explaining that I wasn’t a moron, they offered me a service date in ….six weeks’ time. Now I may be wrong here, but I’m pretty sure in six weeks’ time we will be in the middle of winter and I won’t need the air con…

Is it too much to ask to have a car that just works, goes from 0-60 in less than 3 seconds, has a top speed of over 200mph and corners like it’s on rails?

Or it just me …. being picky …being a grumpy old bastard.

 

Mike C