Jon Pentel sent a message to Earl Hesterberg that said:
Dear Mr Hesterberg,
I wish to contact you to make you aware of the dreadful service that my wife has recently experienced at Barons Mini in Borehamwood England, which is part of a business that Group 1 Automotive has recently purchased. It flies completely against the motto on the company email: Integrity, Transparency, Professionalism, Teamwork. None of which we have experienced. I apologise for the length of this message but I do hope you can take this up with Darren Guiver and Tony Murphy. Email complaint sent to them follows: Dear Mr Guiver,
I am contacting you to complain in the strongest possible terms about the abject customer service and money grabbing attitude of the service staff at the aftersales in Borehamwood.
My wife bought a Mini reg no LR67 XKD from Barons in September 2018. Last weekend (19th February) some strange noises were coming from it when she braked. She called Mini emergency assistance who came out and advised her that the brake pads were worn down and the discs were gone as well and she shouldn't drive it. This, in a car that has done 14,000 miles and has not been driven hard. This suggests a build fault as brake pads and discs simply don't fail after that length of time unless the vehicle is faulty. The warning light did not come on at any point to suggest the pads were worn down to the point were it was impacting the discs. The emergency assistance person also indicated that there was most likely a fault.
Despite this your dealership insisted that there was nothing wrong and that it was wear and tear (really! After 14,000 miles) and Tony Murphy, who we eventually got hold of, told us that we were just unlucky.
Having queried this and asked for tests to be done, the dealership did not call back at all, leaving us with a hire car rental which we could have been responsible for and would not get in contact at all. On attempting to call them to get some kind of response, the extension rang out and then when to a mailbox with the message "this mailbox is full, please try again". Hardly the sort of response a service centre manager should be given to their customers.
Eventually after raising this to Chandlers Head Office in Brighton, they got Tony Murphy to contact me but only after Colin Donno had called my wife to say that he was to contact her as Chris Nash, the service manager was very busy. How insulting and demeaning - implication that she is not worth the time or attention of the manager. Absolutely disgraceful.
Needless to say that the "tests" were a whitewash and unsurprisingly there was no fault found. We ended up having to pay a large bill for a car that has not even been with us 18 months.
Apart from that the service at this truly abysmal dealership is entirely inadequate, disinterested, lackadaisical and at times downright rude. Despite Tony Murphy having promised that the car hire was the responsibility of the dealership as the delay in returning the hire car was entirely their fault, they have still not confirmed this to the hire company despite their promise, last Friday that they would do so. And unsurprisingly, the hire company have tried to contact them without success.
I would appreciate your comments on this. Meantime I feel that I am obligated to warn the public of the implication of buying a Mini where you can be "expensively unlucky" in less than 18 months and advising them in the strongest terms possible that if they still do so to avoid Barons Borehamwood at all costs and never ever take your car in for any sort of work there.
âI do hope to hear from you. Kind regards Jon Pentel
