Week Thirteen Wherein The Metal Overlord Has Audi Issues
Regular readers will know that I have a chum who twiddles knobs for a little beat combo called Metallica. Well, at Expo last week I met his old mate Dave. Except only his sister and his mum are allowed to call him Dave as everybody has called him ‘Shirt’ for ever. I’m not entirely sure why Anyway, Shirt is into his fishing and I’m going to see if I can get him some larks with the Anglers Mail, just for the contrast between the peace of pleasure fishing and his day job, also as a sound engineer – for Manson and Slipknot.
I met Shirt at Expo for the trade magazine Mobile Electronics News. Mick had brought his new Audi with so I could introduce him to the chaps from Ultimate Audio in Bromsgrove who are top craftsmen. Such that they are both FOUR Masters dealers and dealers for the Celsus Ice distributed brands, including the mighty JL Audio. They are going to fit an Audison BIT series front end OEM access and fettling device to the Audi and then fill all the speaker holes with JL’s bestest and put some bass neatly in the capacious boot. Or they will when they get the car to actually be able to book it in. Incidentally, the FOUR Masters’ promise that if you don’t approve the work, they will remove and refund, has never been invoked.
Only trouble is, Mick’s owned the car for three months but Audi have had it back for two of them, with some German engineers coming over to try to work out what it is that makes the car simply kill all its electrics, ignition-off, should you be in reverse gear and attempt to steer.
Resulting in ‘˜Stalled Fool’, a look which doesn’t look good when trying to parallel park in reverse in a slightly busy high street. So far, all he has is a ‘It is definitely not the gearbox causing the problem.’ from the visiting engineers.
Now Mick is a sweet and lovely fellow who always has people tell him he is too soft but he is a little vexed now that they have had the car back longer than he has had to drive it. It’s off to the Milton Keynes Audi HQ for the best diagnostics it can get finally but the complex electronics have definitely seemed to have a Gremlin in the works. He’s unhappy as hell, especially as he had five Lexus (or is that ‘˜Lexii?’) before and only sold them as they got old without ever and I mean EVER having a problem. Even his favourite oily-bits-bloke told him ‘˜oh you’ll have problems, there mate’ when he revealed what he was buying.
Audi have to sell a complete, working product, ‘˜fit for purpose’ under UK law the Sales of Goods Act. In the USA they have a recent-ish set of ‘˜Lemon Laws’ which pertain to buying a car in particular and if it turns out to be a ‘˜lemon’ the US buyer now has the legal right to say ‘Sorry, I want my money back!’ As it stands, I reckon Audi aughta re-boot the bitch, give it back toute-suite, say ‘Sorry we took so long and looked like we didn’t know what we were doing or could care less’ and give him a proper we-mean-it-we’re-sorry’s worth of free servicing for the foreseeable future.
But that’s just my opinion
I found this cool image about car audio competing on Facebook and thieved it shamelessly. It’s part of a new trend with series of images with the same theme to the captions… Now I must get on as I have parcels to send.
Adam Rayner On Line Editor