Newbie - Dilemma?!

Luckily the garage were at least honourable in only charging me the original labour charge (4.5hrs!) and then just the additional parts on the subsequent visits.

In all honesty the reg/rec would have been my next port of call when I broke down, but being a new rider and eager to get riding I took it to a garage to speed things up. Live and Learn

[SV650rules]

Just a story about a Fiat Punto Automatic (CVT) that my wife had a few years ago, a bit of a money pit, but that is another story. The car was only a couple of years old when it started refusing to pull away from standstill, more than a bit annoying at islands and junctions with other traffic behind, it did not do it all the time and there seemed no rhyme or reason behind the fault, After a couple of weeks it went back to main dealer, who kept it for 3 weeks to try to track fault down, they replaced the ECU and a couple of other big bits with a few numbers after the £ sign (still under warranty so could not charge us anything), gave the car back (with a few plastic cups and sandwich wrappers in the back) and lo and behold after a few days the fault was back. I decided to try smaller dealer a few miles away, who did Fiat, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, went in and described the fault to the service guy, straight away he said 'bring it back day after tomorrow, we need to order a part'. Took it back few days later, they replaced a switch on the brake pedal and charged £12.50 including fitting, seems the switch was to inhibit the CVT drive if car thought brake was pressed and the original switch had a dodgy contact in it (typical Italian electric part quality). Just goes to show that 1 - main dealers techs are not always very smart 2 - sometimes people don't do basic checks very well and shoot off on wrong track and the simple, obvious things get overlooked.

The CVT Fiat Punto was not even very common, which made the diagnosis of the tech at the smaller place even more astounding, he didn't even look at the car.