Parts linger in motor factors for years, ready for when someone eventually needs them
Unless you’re the sort of driver who makes an appointment at a local garage for a new wiper blade, you may be familiar with the sometimes aggravating process of finding and purchasing car parts.
It goes something like this: let’s make up a completely random fake scenario and imagine that your 1993 Peugeot 405 1.9 TD GTX Estate needs a new indicator relay a couple of days before you’re due to drive from Kent to Toulouse.
You lift the bonnet, locate the relay panel, identify the offending part that refuses to tick and tock like it should and note down its number.
Then you head online – and are confronted by a dizzying array of relays that look a bit but not exactly like the one you need, at wildly different prices and all subject to a delivery fee far greater than the cost of the part itself.
You will wait five to seven days for some of them, maybe a few weeks if it’s coming from another hemisphere. The sellers all have names like TopCarPartsNow4UDirectCheap and worryingly low feedback ratings.
Dejected, you visit a big-name parts supplier chain and explain your quandary. They ask for your car’s numberplate before telling you it’s not a match in their system and sending you down the road to the local branch of a well-known purveyor of bicycles and roof racks, from which you will inevitably emerge empty-handed.
But then you call in at the independent motor factor on the high street. It has been there since Grandad had his Granada and stocks more varieties of Jubilee clips than Liberty does perfumes.
Crates of mismatched HT leads dangle precariously from on high, huge cans of Valvoline litter the floor and a Rover 25’s fuel pump drips slowly onto the wooden worktop. There are brands of spark plug stocked here that haven’t been relevant since the Cold War.
But chummy boy behind the till knows exactly what he’s doing. “405, is it?” he grins, as he picks a box seemingly at random and rifles through a seemingly impenetrable pile of yellowing freezer bags, pausing only to squint every so often at an indecipherable felt-tip squiggle on their labels.
“That’s the puppy,” he says, as he tips this most elusive of electronics into your palm. “Three-pin, yeah? Think the 205 had four.”
You can only nod wordlessly, gobsmacked that the holy grail you had worked so hard to find was two miles down the road this whole time, no doubt having been safely ensconced in this sage’s collection since not long after the 405 was launched.
He even lets you run outside to make sure it works, unbothered by the prospect of a few scuffs on the gold terminals, and is unsurprised when it does. “Be all right for a few years, that,” he remarks, sipping his tea and logging the purchase in biro on a tatty notepad next to the till.
Presumably he now urgently needs to replenish his stock of 405 indicator relays. And the price for salvation? “Call it a fiver, mate – and take a couple of those fuses just in case.”
Forget fancy dealership coffees and over-the-air updates: this is peak aftersale support, and a rare automotive pleasure denied to anyone who doesn’t muck about with old motors. Support your local and make sure they stick around for years to come.
Who knows? Maybe one day you will need a cambelt for your Cupra or some brake pads for your BYD, and there will be someone who knows just which tub they’re in.