But surely you've heard of mechanics taking flash cars out for a spin before the customer returns only to have an accident?

Victoria Pendleton is here. Queue my male colleagues standing up and trying to get a good view into the board room.

Cue?

Meh. I wouldn't have bothered.

In which case the mechanic would be an utter dimwit. If I ran a prestige car service shop/dealership I'd make 'taking a customer's car out for a spin' unless it was required a sackable offense. How much business would you lose if people didn't think they could trust you with their car?

According to The Daily Mirror, he's done roughly 20 grand's worth of damage to the car. Luckily he appears to be son of the dealership owner, or I suspect he'd be out on his arse even given they're insured.

More details here. Not sure about the provenance of that site though.

Jon

I'm pretty sure the person doing the MOT isn't allowed to "take the car out for a spin" so it passes it's emission tests.
Surely an inspector should pass or fail based on the readings taken at test time

Aye, well. In contrast Kerri-Anne Payne and Rebecca Adlington were in a shopping centre near my home recently selling cupcakes to raise money for children in need. No, really they were. Was mildly miffed I couldn't get there for a sample .

CORRECTION

That was what I meant. What on earth did you think I was talking about? I loves a bit of cake me.

Maybe not, but I guess most would if it was borderline and the engine's cold. It's a service to the customer. Unfortunately getting a car like that nice and hot obviously has its risks!

Or maybe someone who was bored and pished off waiting for some numpty to figure out how to use the camera...

General consensus seems to be it was a brakes test (which you'd have to say it failed). Apparently you can't brake test 4WD cars on a 'rolling road' setup unless it's one that fits all four wheels, which most garages don't have. With a 2WD drive car you can have the drive wheels on the RR and the non-drive wheels on the floor and the non-drive wheels won't spin when the others do, as they're not being driven. With a 4WD car, all four wheels will want to spin so unless there's some way of decoupling the 4WD, you have to do them on an actual road or a 4 wheel rig.

That all sounds kind of feasible. But if I was brake testing a 200 grand car, I'd do it on a big open road with no obstacles near by, not down a country lane with cars parked on the side...

Jon

So a bored and disgruntled sociopath then?

That happened to me recently when a line manager accused me and others of bullying people for turning on the air conditioning, as if trying to be jokey about the fact people were ready to pass out was a misdemeanor. It's fcuking shocking what happens to people when they get a little bit of authority