Provide you own spare parts for exotic cars

Press, 5 December 1985, Page 67

Provide you own spare parts for exotic cars

If you are going to spend your annual holiday on the borders of Fiordland or in the depths of the Urewera Country, do not expect to find garages carrying wide ranges of spares for your Rolls Royce or Ferrari. Cars such as those and the other exotics are pretty thin on the ground in those regions, and most garage and service station proprietors expect to see them only a little more often than Halley’s Comet. M.T.A. service stations and garages usually have something in their spare parts bins that will remedy the ills that beset the more popular makes of cars and their trained staff is usually sufficiently resourceful to repair a damaged component or adapt a stock spare to do the job for the remainder of an annual holiday. However, owners of the rare and more exotic cars should not expect too much. To carry a full range of spare parts for every make and model on New Zea-

land’s roads is simply out of the question for any service station or garage. That is why M.T.A. members and the Automobile Associations strongly recommend that car owners carry with them a range of the more common and easily transportable spares most likely to be required. Distributors and franchise holders of the rarer and more exotic cars know from experience the parts in the cars they handle that most commonly fail, and, as they are rightly anxious to retain the goodwill of their customers, most will willingly make up a small but comprehensive kit of spares for an owner to carry along with the holiday baggage. It may be that the owner could not even identify the part in question, nor have any idea of its particular function. That does not matter, an A.A. patrolman or the staff at an MTA garage or service station will usually encounter little difficulty in

pin-pointing the trouble and identifying the part in the spares kit and fitting it to get that piece of exotica on the move once more.

In fact, it makes good sense for the owner of even the more popular make of car to carry a spares kit when on holiday. Even the best-run garages and service stations, 1 especially in the more remote locations, find it hard to keep their spares bins full during annual holidays, a time when it seems all New Zealand takes to the roads and at least half the country encounters some sort of minor car trouble while the distant warehouses are shut down during the annual break.

After all, what could be more annoying than to have the petrol pump on your Lamborghini go on the blink just when you had got it on the open road and pointed in the right direction for a holiday in which you did have great expectations.?