My VW Up is almost three years old, passed an MOT yesterday and the warranty in soon up. Are there any downsides to independent garages? I used a local one four years ago, he was very good. My concern is access to parts so the car could end up off the road for longer, or returning when parts arrive. My past experience is that big faults appear at ~8 years, before then it is things like brakes and wheel bearings.

The important thing is whether it's a GOOD workshop, not whether it's franchised - my trusted local independent gives me a choice of pattern parts, or OE parts from the local dealer, but in both cases they're at the workshop within a couple of hours.

One other thing to bear in mind, is that if you continue to use the local VW dealership, you are much more likely to get goodwill contributions to major faults even when the car is outside its warranty period - a sort of 'thank you' for being a 'loyal customer'.

Of course, I suspect the experience does vary from one manufacturer to another, and I personally only have experience in that regard with Nissan and more laterly Mazda. I'm sure there's enough VW owners here to give advice to you on that score, especially when factoring in the (normally) decent savings on servicing and repairs you can expect from a (still decent) independent garage.

It might make a positive difference as well if your car doesn't have too many gizmos that could fail, i.e. servicing is quite simple and not much else to go wrong that needs specialist help.

Best of luck.

Edited by Engineer Andy on 15/02/2015 at 10:03