Alpine Manchester charged me £365 inc Vat
I can highly recommend Alpine Manchester to you all.
I had booked into St Albans for Monday but then found myself in Manchester for a meeting so thought I’d save a journey and cancelled St Albans and booked into Manchester earlier in the week.
The law of sod applied and I found my meeting cancelled- I knew the service/recall time was about 6 hours and so arrived at Alpine Manchester anyway wondering what I was going to do for 6 hours...
Ian, the tech, let me into the Alpine showroom as I was there at 8 and I grabbed a coffee whilst I checked my emails. We had a chat and he then left to get the car onto the ramps.
Ian, who runs the showroom (Alpinemcr on here) came in shortly afterwards and introduced himself. I explained my predicament and he said to make myself at home in the showroom. I’m afraid to say I did and he put up with me for the entire day. My public apologies - nobody should have to put up with me for an entire day.
Ian was a font of knowledge and answered the many questions I had - one that had been bugging me was whether the Alpine hard body cases would fit in the front boot. I’d seen a small photo of what appeared to be two cases in the front at Geneva but three dealers I’d checked with didn’t have them in stock.
Anyway seems the old blue cases are discontinued but Ian had a pair of the new carbon-effect cases already in one of the showroom cars and they fit with room to spare. So there you go - the hard cases do fit.
Ian is genuinely enthusiastic about the cars and was hugely helpful.
Six hours later all done - radio upgrade wasn’t done as there was an issue with the download from Alpine but everything else was done. A rattle I mentioned I had from the front of the dash seems to have been fixed (fingers crossed).
Traffic home was awful so I don’t know what the new injector mapping/gearbox tweaks have done but as bcr notes the manual override on the gearbox is now too long (in my opinion as well). Perhaps French rond-points are smaller than English ones but I, too, found myself having to grab another gear before leaving roundabouts. Hopefully I’ll get used to it or it can be tweaked again in due course.
I’d forgotten to ask them not to clean the car but they did a good job. I’d intended to hoover the interior beforehand but had forgotten. With a gravel drive the inside of the car picks up lots of small stones and I’m sure it was about the weight of a Cayman before they hoovered it
.
So car now ready for another 12 month’s motoring and I’ll be taking it back to Manchester when I’m in the area for one of their cars/coffee meets.