I would concur.

Anyone else annoyed for the owner, what have the techs been doing at service time? the usual complete brake service comprising of squinting through the wheel at the fraction of visible pad and squirting brake cleaner in the general direction? that it?

bah.

The only people i trust to service my brakes properly is my old MB indy, always fully stripped cleaned lubed, otherwise its DIY.

This in turn has filtered down to the retail customer as VW (and other manufacturers), hence the loss of removing wheels etc on scheduled servicing.

Same problem a while back.

Now I go and have "free" brake checks in national chains...KF will take the wheels off and the calipers and check operation and tell you iff it needs doing. I kept mum when the techie did it last year and he came and shoewd me the pad that was worn to nothing, allowed them to do it £65 inc and got lifetime warranty.

Most main dealers will not do a full brake check unless you specifically request, and will charge an hour plus parts at main dealer prices.

If you did the job properly there was no way you could do it in that time, so cutting corners was the only was to make bonus.

I too used to work at a Vauxhall main agents. Everyone used to "love" doing the fleet car servicing. High mileage service it was called, got a massive .70 hours to do it in !!!!

Needless to say most of the schedule was overlooked and the boot was rarely opened to check the spare etc. As one old timer used to say "oil & filter, kick the tyres and p**s in the water bottle"

Was a shock to the system when I later worked in a couple of Indy garages. Got some decent times for servicing, and, more importantly, took wheels / drums off and did a proper inspection / service on them too.