Vehicle Health Check

A vehicle health check is an hour on the ramp with somebody who is not trying to sell you anything. Fifty pounds. You get the actual measurements pad thickness, tread depth, fluid condition, battery state written down, plus a straight answer about what needs doing now and what will keep until spring.

Most people find out their car needed something on the day it stopped working. A brake pipe does not fail out of nowhere; it corrodes from the inside for a year first, and none of that is visible from the driver's seat. Same with a wheel bearing, a coolant hose gone soft, a battery that has been getting lazier every cold morning since November. Somebody just has to look.

Nothing gets replaced during the check. Nothing gets touched. You leave with a report and you are free to do whatever you like with it including taking it to another garage.

Get it booked in tell us what the car is doing and we will put the right time aside for it. Call 01763 230 411.

A vehicle health check is a structured inspection of the parts of a car that wear out brakes, tyres, suspension, steering, fluids, battery, exhaust and lights. It is a measurement exercise, not a repair. The output is a written report grading each item, so you can plan the work instead of reacting to it.

The trade shortens it to VHC. Dealers who send you a video of it call it an eVHC. Same job underneath. What changes between one and the next is who is paying for it and why more on that further down.

Here is the list. Not "a multi-point inspection" the points.

Uneven wear on a front tyre gets reported, because it tells you something about the suspension. We do not sell tyres and we have no alignment rig, so if that is what it needs, we will say so and you will get it done elsewhere. We would rather tell you than pretend not to have noticed.

You are welcome to watch. Six ramps, off-road parking, and the technician who looked at your car is the one who talks to you about it not somebody reading a screen at a reception desk.

One thing the check is not: fault diagnosis. Warning light on? Noise you want chased down? That is a job in its own right and it is priced as one. Have a look at vehicle diagnostics instead different work, different bill, and we will tell you which of the two you actually need before you book anything.

Every item comes back red, amber or green, with the number next to it wherever a number exists.

• Green: fine, nothing to do.

• Amber: wearing, with an estimate of how long it has left. "Front pads at 4mm" tells you far more than "brakes advisory".

• Red: needs attention now, on safety or on cost grounds.

The report is yours. Take it to your usual garage if you have one. That has never been a problem for us.

Those are starting prices, not quotes. Ring with the registration and we will give you a real figure for your car. 01763 230 411.

Booking a service anyway? Say so. The inspection sits inside the service and you are not paying for the hour twice.

You can get a free vehicle health check. Most main dealers will do one, and plenty of fast-fit chains too. Ask yourself what it is for.

A free check is a sales tool. It exists to fill the workshop diary, and the technician doing it knows perfectly well which findings turn into booked work. That is not a conspiracy it is simply how the model pays for itself. Some of what comes out of it is absolutely outrageous, mind. A three-year-old car handed back with four amber items and a quote stapled to them.

Ours costs fifty pounds because it is the product, not the bait. Nobody in this building earns anything on what the report says. If the answer is "your car is fine, come back in a year", that is a perfectly good outcome and you have still had your money's worth, because now you know.

Most of the cars that reach us at four or five years old have never actually been looked at.

There is a reason for that. They spent their first three years on a lease, serviced to a schedule written to keep the cost down until the handover, and nobody was ever going to spend money on something that would be the next owner's problem. That car is now your problem. Worth an hour of somebody's time, surely?

Two things people ring up expecting. Let us be clear about both.

It does not replace an MOT. An MOT is a legal test with a certificate, carried out at a test centre, and it is not something we offer we are a repair workshop. A health check carries no legal standing whatsoever. What it does is tell you, months in advance, what would have failed.

It is not a pre-purchase inspection either. We do not inspect cars you are thinking of buying. No history checks, no valuation, no opinion on whether it is a good buy. This is a check on a car you already own, on our ramp, on a booked appointment.

• The car has come off a lease or a warranty and you have inherited whatever the last owner ignored

• Before a long trip, a house move, or handing it to a new driver in the family

• You have been quoted for something expensive and you want a second pair of eyes on it

• Before you sell it, so you find out what a buyer is going to find out

• Once a year between services, if the car does high mileage

All makes and models. That is worth a word of explanation rather than a list of badges: we run the manufacturers' own software rather than a generic code reader ISTA for BMW and Mini, ODIS and VCDS for the VW group, XENTRY for Mercedes-Benz, Pathfinder for Land Rover and Jaguar, Techstream for Toyota and Lexus. On a health check that matters less than it does on a fault. It matters when the check turns something up and you want to know what happens next.

A vehicle health check costs £50, takes about an hour, and puts real numbers against the parts of your car that wear out no repairs on the day, nothing sold to you, and a written report you can take anywhere. It is not an MOT, not a diagnosis and not a pre-purchase inspection. What it does is turn "I hope it is alright" into a list with figures on it, which is the difference between planning a spend and being ambushed by one. If your car came off a lease, is heading for a long trip, or has simply never had anyone look at it properly, an hour on the ramp is cheap information.

Give us a ring, or come and see the workshop for yourself. We are a few minutes off the A10. Call 01763 230 411