I had my 2 year old/15K mile 335d into the dealer for its first service eight days ago. Becasue of the crappy weather, I wasn't too inclined to inspect the car, but today, I decided to have a poke around. Looking at the dipstick, the oil appears fairly black. I didn't take a sample of the oil beforehand for comparison, but it looks a lot more black than I have seen on other cars that I have owned, shortly after the oil has been changed. At a guess, the car has clocked up something in the region of 30-50 miles since servicing. Would you expect it to look fairly clear at this point, or could a car (especially a diesel) blacken it over this kind of distance? I guess one factor could be how much residual old oil was left in the sump and oilways. If they weren't careful to drain as much as possible and replaced the sump plug as soon as the majority of the old oil had disgorged, the residual gunk could taint the new stuff. It's playing on my mind a bit because the cost of the new oil alone was =A3120 and I would hate to think that it hadn't even been changed! The other things I noticed were i) a good litre of void space in the washer reservoir and ii) a lot of leaves and crud clogging the mesh drain covers under the bonnet at either side of the windscreen end of the engine bay. In respect of i), I have barely used the windscreen washer since servicing and I would have imagined that topping this up would be on the job list. In respect of ii), the leaves dropped off the trees months ago, so I can't see this having happened during the last week. Does it sound as though I have been stiffed? I know dealer servicing is never what some folks would consider VFM, but one doesn't expect to be charged for stuff that hasn't been done.
Cheers, Jim.