Visit to Kah Motor

I’m here at Kah Motor again. It’s not actually the regular servicing, but rather a follow-up on a problem complaint because they failed to address it during the regular servicing appointment scheduled last week. There was something wrong with the door handle. The service advisor wasn’t listening, and fixed the wrong thing (which I had no complaint about). Car servicing is actually rather a hassle. Even if they provide shuttle rides to the MRT station, it doesn’t really make that much of a difference.

What’s wrong with the door handle? Well, the opening action isn’t smooth. Toward the end of the handle’s travel as it is pulled open, there is some resistance and plastic clicking sound. It is as if something is stuck. There’s nothing like it with any other doors. I dropped off the car before 9am, and by the time I picked it up after 3pm, it was unfixed.

The other problem I reported turned out to be “user problem”. My Alpine in-car entertainment system was missing a bunch of features, mostly related to configuration and settings, from time to time. Sometimes it is there, sometimes it isn’t. Again, the service advisor wasn’t listening. He tells me there is nothing wrong. I asked him to show me how to set the time (which had gone haywire after the servicing, probably because they must have removed the power for a sufficiently long period of time). We tried to follow the instruction manual, but the description just did not match up with what we got from the Alpine system.

The sad thing is that instead offering to look into the problem, I am told that they aren’t really trained to install the system, that they don’t know how to use it themselves, and that normally they don’t want to touch it in case the customer (i.e. car owners) accuses them of damaging the system. I was given a phone number to someone in Alpine, and told to consult them myself.

Which I did. The Alpine person immediately pointed out that the parking brake must be engaged for all those “missing” features to appear. Wah. It was not documented in the manual! I can understand that the DVD playing function is disabled while driving (which basically means parking brake not engaged), but I thought it is not so intuitive that setup functions were also disabled.

Anyway, good thing that the Alpine system was fixed.

While waiting here at Kah Motor, I saw the fuel economy label, the new thingy commanded by our National Environment Agency, the Honda Stream is officially rated for 7.1l/100km. It’s actually more efficient than the equivalent engine sized Honda Civic.