I must have done around seventeen points in the turn, but when I started to head out it transpired I should have done nineteen and I scraped a door on a wall. Looking at the wall afterwards, in case I'd caused it any damage, it was apparent that I wasn't the first driver to scrape a door on it.
Annoyingly, my wife was in the car with me at the time, so I couldn't invent someone else to blame. It was my fault.
I asked MG if they did bodywork repairs, and they said no; they did, however, recommend a repair shop not far from where they were based, so I went to that. They said they could replace the rear door for something like £2,700 — more, if I claimed it off my insurance. This seemed excessive to me, so I looked for some other places. The first one I found would do it for a thousand quid less, so I went with that.
I booked it in for the next week. It would take five days to fix, because they had to do a colour match. On the second day, I got a call telling me there was a problem. Apparently, the 2025 MG ZS+ Trophy hybrid has a different rear driver-side door to the 2024 MG ZS+ Trophy hybrid, and the replacement door they'd bought was falsely advertised as being 2025 when it was 2024.
They also said that there was a problem with supplies of this door. They're made in China, and are shipped over to the UK somewhat sporadically. I was told they'd keep a lookout for one, and would contact me when they found one. They warned that it could take anything from a week to a year for one to appear.
Come February, three months exactly after I scraped the door, I hadn't heard a peep from them. I emailed, asking if they'd forgotten me, but they hadn't. There were still no doors available.
I wasn't impressed by this, so did an Internet search myself for a 2025 MG ZS+ Trophy hybrid rear driver-side door. Immediately, a match came up on one of eBay's car-parts sub-sites. It looked fine, so I asked the body repair shop if it would do and they said yes. Their own eBay search was somewhat more general and didn't pick it up, apparently. Anyway, they ordered it, fixed a dent it acquired during transport, and last week they painted it and installed it.
It looks pretty good, although it doesn't have the fancy protective spray on it that the rest of the car does.
I wonder how long it would have taken them to find a door if I hadn't looked for one myself.
I wonder how soon I could have had my car fixed if I'd looked for a door earlier.
I wonder how long I'd have had to wait to get my door fixed if I'd left it a week before looking for a replacement myself, given that the boss of the company split from his wife and went on holiday to Egypt.
Oh well, it's nice and smart now, except for the dirt splashes it picked up the moment I drove it out of the repair works.