Nightmare weekend - car breakdown

keithclancy

If you can think of a bad experience for breakdowns this would be it.

Was heading to a music festival in Belgium on thursday, packed up the car and left at 7.30am from Eindhoven, headed off toward Werchter.

Just outside Antwerp all the dials drop, error comes up on the dash about something being "low" .. pulled into the bus lane, no hard shoulder around.

Tried restarting and nothing, stuck at the side of the road.

Called my breakdown cover, RouteMobiel. They said grand, sending someone from a town up the road. An hour passes by and noone turns up, ring back and they say their on their way. another hour passes. Ring back again and they say he 15 minutes away. 30 minutes pass, then a guy eventually turns up in a recovery truck with Dutch Plates !!! They were after sending a guy from Holland.

He says hes bringing us to a garage "just over the border" about 30 minutes away. End up in Terneuzen which is on the other side of the country in Zeeland (West of Holland and we live in the East)

We get to the garage, they can't look at the car because their fully booked and don't have any rental cars (replacement car is covered on our policy)

Call breakdown coverage and they say we can get a Taxi to Zeebrugge (further north) and get a car rental from there but they'll only give us a Mitsubishi Colt and I have a Volvo V50 full of camping gear.

Girlfriend loses it on the phone with them stating she wanted to speak to a manager, kept ringing back until we got one. Then they realise that we live in Holland, up till then they thought we were tourists. (I would not like to be a tourist recieving that kind of treatment)

So the guy with the recovery truck drove us all the way back to another recovery company in Eindhoven, finally managed to get a Ford Focus C-Max and fit all the stuff into it. The recovery company dropped the car down to my local garage the next day.

Drove down to Werchter, took 1hr 30 to get to just outside the town and then another 3 hours stuck in a queue to get to the campsite.

Festival was fantastic, had a great time.

Got home today and rang the garage this morning,

580 euros for 11 hours labour including tax, his exact words "Its really wierd, never seen it before but the cable had worked loose from the fusebox on the passenger side"

Then it hit me .... I changed a fuse on Thursday for the 12v socket... It must have come loose and then worked its way out from road vibration, bloody sick !!

Didn't think of it at the time because the lads were freaking out about getting to the festival, it was 34 degrees and we were stuck in a bus lane on a Belgian motorway.

This is what our debacle looked like:
Link

I guess crap like this happens .. nothing you can do but just move on and forget about it.

I have to pickup the car later and drop back the rental too ... think i'll stick my bicycle in the back and cycle home !

CarMuppet

That's hard luck alright... but I guess in theory you should be able to change a fuse without worrying about a cable at the rear of the fusebox working loose. It sounds like a main (B+) cable supply some rail in the fusebox disconnected for some reason.

Also, going to play devils avocate here, but 11 hours to find a cable disconnected at the back of a fuseboard/box? i.e a permanent catatrophic fail should be easy to pin point in a faction of that time. Even taking into account removing daskboard/panels to again access. I could understand 2 days work finding a corroded cables within a tightly bunched wiring loom that was causing an intermittent problem etc.


Do you know why the 12V socket fuse blew in the first place?


Good to hear you got to the gig... at least you got there in one piece..

keithclancy

CarMuppet wrote: »

That's hard luck alright... but I guess in theory you should be able to change a fuse without worrying about a cable at the rear of the fusebox working loose. It sounds like a main (B+) cable supply some rail in the fusebox disconnected for some reason.

Also, going to play devils avocate here, but 11 hours to find a cable disconnected at the back of a fuseboard/box? i.e a permanent catatrophic fail should be easy to pin point in a faction of that time. Even taking into account removing daskboard/panels to again access. I could understand 2 days work finding a corroded cables within a tightly bunched wiring loom that was causing an intermittent problem etc.


Do you know why the 12V socket fuse blew in the first place?


Good to hear you got to the gig... at least you got there in one piece..

The fuse popped when I was using an FM Transmitter thing, looks like it shorted. That bloody yolk is going in the bin, blew a fuse on my last car too.

I guess it is a long time to find the fault, I guess if i went home and sorted it i would have found it myself eventually, at the time we just wanted to get there and I didn't want to see everyones weekend ruined.

Expensive option but the other alternative would have been to go home in the hope of fixing it .. and it didn't seem like that was possible at the time.

In hindsight i could have rang and told him that i changed a fuse on thursday, but was so monged out with the heat and the boozing at the festival i didnt think of it

Muckie

Jesus thats a hell of an adventure!

Glad you had a good time at the festival.

CarMuppet

keithclancy wrote: »

but was so monged out with the heat and the boozing at the festival i didnt think of it

Hey, you had a great time! and that's what matters, right?

DonJose

keithclancy wrote: »

580 euros for 11 hours labour including tax

It could have been worse, you could have broken down in Ireland. Anybody car to guess what 11 hours labour including tax would cost in Ireland, I'd say €1k+.