A second floor for Al-Bireh — twenty more cars under glass

The building on Nablus Street has been our home for eleven years, and for most of them the cars we could not fit inside sat in the yard. That ends this month: the second floor opened on Saturday with twenty covered display bays, a glass frontage onto the street, and a delivery lounge that finally gives a handover the privacy it deserves.

The floor was designed around one thing — light. Sixty metres of north-facing glazing means a customer sees a panel the way our inspectors see it on the ramp, with nothing flattered by spotlights. Every bay has its own lighting rig calibrated to the same colour temperature, so the silver you compare upstairs is the silver you drive home.

Downstairs changes too. With display moved up, the ground floor becomes the working part of the building: two inspection ramps, the parts counter, and a waiting area with a window into the workshop. If you have ever wondered what a two-hundred-point inspection actually looks like, you can now watch one.

A customer should be able to see the panel exactly as our inspector saw it. Everything else is decoration.

The delivery lounge is the part we are proudest of. Handover used to happen wherever there was space; now it is a closed room with the car alongside, the documents on the table and one advisor who stays with you until the last question is answered. No traffic through the room, no queue behind you.

The expansion adds nine jobs, seven of them technical, and every one filled locally. Our apprentices from the training centre take three of those places — which was the point of starting the programme in the first place.