It finds the last slot before it expires.

That is the right risk to name, and it's sharper here than almost anywhere: a careless sentence on this phone doesn't just lose a customer, it becomes a price you're held to or a diagnosis the customer has already accepted before the car arrives. So it states published prices and nothing else — the MOT fee, the menu service, the diagnostic hour — and on a fault call it writes the symptom down the way she said it, with the reg and the mileage on it, then stops. It won't say what's wrong, it won't say what it'll cost, and it won't say the car is safe to drive. But the honest half of the answer is that the calls worth catching mostly aren't technical. MOT runs out Thursday. Is the silver Golf still there. Can I move Thursday to Friday. Is it ready — which it answers by getting your reg and her question to the counter in seconds, not by pretending it can see the ramp. None of those need a technician, and every one of them is going to voicemail at twenty past eight on a Monday while you're taking a locking wheel nut key off somebody in the car park.

No to either, and neither is a switch you can turn on. On a fault call it does one thing: writes the symptom down the way she said it — “clunking when I turn, worse when it's cold” — with the reg and the mileage attached, and says a technician will ring. On price it reads what you've published: the MOT fee, the menu service, the diagnostic hour. Everything else is an estimate that comes from a person after the car has been looked at, and it says so in those words. Estimate and quote have different legal weight in this trade, and it never says the second one.

No, and it won't be pushed into it. A result is recorded on DVSA's testing service by the nominated tester who conducted the test; nobody on a phone can state one, predict one, or hint at one. What it does do is the bit customers actually ring about — book inside the month-minus-a-day window so they keep their anniversary date, and tell them plainly when the last slot before their expiry has gone.

It helps, and it is worth being exact about how, because the obvious answer would be a lie. Nothing in this product can see your ramp, your job sheet or your technician, and the appointment side of it only reads bookings that have not happened yet — the moment her car is actually in your hands it is invisible to the machine. So it does not answer her. It takes the registration, reads it back, takes the question underneath the question — is it ready, can I have it by three, has the part landed — and puts both in front of whoever has her keys while she is still on the line, or transfers her if an advisor can take it. What you get back is the three or four minutes an advisor burns walking to a screen with somebody waiting at the counter, several times a day, and a customer who has been spoken to rather than left ringing out.

No. It answers calls; it doesn't make them, and it shouldn't make this one. The authorisation call is the conversation that decides what somebody is billed — under the Motor Ombudsman's Service and Repair Code it's an obligation before extra work starts, and in California it's written law. What it can do is stop that call competing with the switchboard: while you're chasing one customer at work for three attempts, the line isn't engaged for everyone else.

It asks which they want before it does anything else, and the answer changes the tools it's allowed to touch. A Sunday caller with a service question gets a real slot in next week's diary instead of a sales floor that can't book them; a caller about a car on the forecourt gets booked in to drive it and told nothing is held. The two halves of the business stop sharing one answerphone message.