Talk Morgan Forums Morgan Sports Cars Morgan Aero 8, 2012< Plus 8, SuperSports, Coupe & Aeromax End of an Era, for now anyway...

You will be sadly missed in the Aero fold Adrian, I've always enjoyed you posts.
May be interested in the spare wheel(?).
Enjoy your Merc, I hope you won't be bored with it and definitely hope you won't need to experience M Benz' service.

I mean their warranty service (!) Simply deplorable.

Well I just caught up on this thread as we are near sunny Milton Keynes visiting friends for the weekend and picking up some expensive hifi, for me anyway, and taking the opportunity for a 450 mile SL350 drive and shake down. Obviously the MB in comparison to a Morgan is chalk and cheese, that was part of the choice. I have to say it's rather wonderful to drive, if rather Germanic, interestingly it seems to attract the odd person who wants to see how fast it is, which I wasn't expecting. But I found myself able to resist the temptation and just wafted along at my set cruising speed on the A303. comments so far have been, "it's big" (the car), " the seats got a warmer", "ooh it goes up and down and back and forth". So far I am rather pleased with the silver streak.

Thanks to everyone for your lovely wishes, TM is a special place and some of us have made some great friends through it. Whilst it is about Morgan ownership primarily it seems to have transcended just that and established itself as a venue for some rather lovely like minded people to meet up.

Thanks for your support.

Got to agree with you. They have the Germanic belief in their own engineering righteousness. If its conceivable that it could be the customers fault, it is the customers fault.

That said the service we get from Mercedes in Bristol is excellent and they match the prices of the Indies.

Out of all the company cars I've had over the years, I've had three Mercs and I've had serious issues with all three

Apart from one smaller issue with the alloys corroding which the dealer wanted a contribution to fix due to 'betterment' clauses, everything else was handled terrifically well with high spec E class loan cars until they were sorted

The first time the injectors went on a C class Sport took nearly 4 weeks to replace because hundreds of cars were effected

The injectors lasted a year and they went again, in the middle of London, but that's another story

Same with MB of Basingstoke - they were super for my previous two but they have recently been absorbed into Sandown Group so we will see what happens. My experience of MB Guildford was shocking and they are part of Sandown as well.

Adrian, we do not know personally but I read almost any of your Kind posts with great interest. Learning a lot of your experience and your knowledge about Morgans and concerning technical topics in general.
I hope you will continue to be part of this friendly and really cultivated forum (which you have considerably contributed) and I wish you and yours great pleasure with the Benz and also for all your further projects and future plans.

Which means that tlLB and I are dog-sitting Harry,

He is a great house guest and is currently sat comfortably with me in the lounge.

He looks well settled. Probably looking forward to a nice bracing walk this afternoon, followed by a fillet steak meal.

The Sandown Group....an interesting entity.

The Salisbury dealer is part of the group. It seems their loyalty to a customer is largely based on the customer's loyalty to them. As a family we have bought 9 cars from them since 1994 and it is noted.

But they went through a bad patch a couple of years ago when a new service manager proved to be a disaster. That actually prompted me to go to BMW...for a while.
The new one, Josephine Golden, is amazingly good. I reckon she will end up as a Dealer Principal one day.

The Dealer Principal, Chris, runs Salisbury and Winchester and there is a core of senior people who have been there since 2000 or before. The business runs well, does good deals and is hard to fault. That it is the closest dealership, just 3 miles from home, helps.

Interestingly Sandown UK was and may still be owned by Sandown Motor Holdings.

Mercedes-Benz South Africa (MBSA) holds a 62.6 percent share in Sandown Motor Holdings (Pty) Ltd, which owns dealerships in the Western Cape and Gauteng. 12.4% shareholding is held by Managing Director, Roy McAllister, with the remaining 25% vested in a BEE consortium called True Class Consortium.

Sandown Motor Holdings (SMH) commenced trading in May 1982 when it was awarded the Mercedes-Benz franchise for Sandton. The company’s head office is in Bryanston, Gauteng.

But last year there was a restructuring and UK Sandown Group established with just one Director, Mr John Guest, who worked in IT and is now semi-retired, dealing in antique prints. There is no other information on the Companies House web site. Prior to the middle of 2016 one of the McAllister family from South Africa was the UK Director.