Ade E

No Quality and No Control!

A driver who was insured with Direct Line had bumped my car and FRF was their chosen body shop to do the work. The damage was a dent about the size of a 5p piece on the drivers side, rear door. Just to be clear, Direct Line were just fine and very professional. FRF were not. This is the timeline Tuesday 25th of march, I took my car in, as agreed. My car didn’t move all week and stayed in the same space in their car park. Thursday the 27th I got a text telling me my car would be ready on Tuesday April 1st. Tuesday April the 1st I get a call telling me car won’t be ready on Tuesday but will be ready on Wednesday the 2nd. No reasons. Wednesday the 2nd I get a call telling me, even though my car hasn’t even been painted yet, it should be ready by the end of the day! Later on Wednesday I rang up and was told that my car HAD been painted the previous day but had failed their stringent quality control tests. The person on the phone seemed to think that failing a quality control test was a good thing. She told me she estimated my car would be ready on Thursday. I said I’d heard similar before and asked what was the difference between her estimated and a guess. She didn’t know but insisted she estimated it would be ready on Thursday. I guessed she might be wrong. Thursday the 3rd I heard nothing all day. Then around 5pm I got a message saying that my car was just being cleaned and checked and was basically ready for collection. I rang first thing Friday to confirm (because I didn’t believe them!) and went to pick up my car. When I got there I went up to reception. I wasn’t in a good mood and, because I’d raised complaints with Direct Line and told them how crap FRF were, I was expecting an apology or at least some excuses. No such luck I walked in and said “I’ve come to collect my Audi A3”. The young lad on the desk said “the one outside?” and I confirmed that was the one. He didn’t ask for my name or any form of ID. Amazing. We went outside and, as soon as I saw the car, I could see a patch of primer under the drivers door, on the door sill. I opened the door and saw an area of maybe two inches square of primer on the drivers door sill. Considering they’d painted my back door, this was a surprise. I pointed it out to the lad who took me to my car and he tried to wipe it off with his finger. Impressive. He made no effort to sort it out or apologise. He just gave me the keys and went back inside. So a VERY small job which should’ve taken two days, took ten days. It failed one quality control examination and then past with a square of primer on the drivers door sill that could be seen, even when the door was closed. I dread to think how bad the first failure was! Also they gave me a link to a website that shows the progress of the work. It sat at 8% complete for the first week and then jumped to 66% on Thursday the 3rd and finally to 95% on the Friday. I just checked and even though I collected my car four days ago, it’s still showing it’s 95% complete. There’s a section where you can message the body shop too. Don’t bother, they don’t reply. Don’t email either. They ignore those too.