So, what's the consensus on Kings at the moment then?
I got my
Ibiza from them, mixed opinions of them really. The sales guy (Adrian) seemed nice enough but it had obviously been a quiet week for them because he got the price of the car down from £6300 to £6000, taking my battered old golf as the £300 part-ex (VW finance came back and said my application had been successful, but only for £6k).
Shortly afterwards the dreaded emissions light came on, booked it in and had it seen to, the guys cleared the fault code (after I'd stood about looking like a lemon for about 10 minutes because nobody was on the
shop floor) but did warn me that it wouldn't last as it's a recouring fault, also told me it was normally £64 to get it hooked up to a computer (!). Needless to say, the light came back on the following day and has been intermittent ever since, so that's an expense I'm not looking forward to paying, even though I'll just ask them to fit a new lambda sensor as that's what they said was likely to be wrong.
Thing is I've got that £99 2-year free servicing deal with them, so I'm obviously going to use that, but I'm now quite worried about what the quality of the service is going to be like as the INSP notice has come on so it needs booking in - my old Golf went in for a service at a garage called Europa in Bursledon, they broke more things than they fixed and ultimately ruined the car, it took me years to try and figure out what problems they'd left me to solve and get them put right.
Also, to be fair, the guys at kings are at least not nearly as bad as Peter Cooper VW in Hedge End - they're vile. Took my mk3 golf (when I had it) to them and asked if they could check out the engine as it was misfiring, got a dirty look by the bird sat behind the service desk and told that all the mechanics 'were on lunch'. At 3.15pm. I doubted that somehow. And when someone finally came out to speak to me, he treated me like an idiot (I was 18 at the time, but still potentially a paying customer), took one look at my car and point-blank refused to look at it, 'because it's a mk3 and we don't touch anything under mk4's now because there's no money to be made in it.' That was his actual response. I was gob-smacked.
They were also going to charge me £79 for 'an inspection', which I quickly found out basically involved them opening the bonnet, telling me something was wrong, and closing the bonnet - they wouldn't even have told me what specific thing was wrong!
Edit: That was the other thing that set of a small warning bell in my mind about Kings - they got the model of my
Ibiza wrong on the sales sheet. They called it a 1.4 DAB special edition - turns out it was a 1.4 Formula Sport. Not that I'm complaining or anything, I love the car, but you'd have thought they'd get the simplest of facts right like the model of the car they're selling.
