The TRUE cost of not honouring a warranty.
I have just worked out the rough cost to both myself and the manufacturer, because of their refusal to honouring their warranty.
As many of you may be aware, I bought a new 2007 TDV8 Range Rover Vogue Lux and 24 hours after driving it out of the showroom, the systems started failing in the heap.
Within 3 months, it was make blatantly clear to me that the warranty was not going to be honoured.
Now I have, for the pasted 30+ years, nearly always bought new vehicles, mainly because I am not in the slightest bit interested in carrying out any form of mechanical maintenance and rely on the new car warranty to take care of any problems that may occur.
This is what a warranty is supposed to be for.
Well my 07 RR was such a heap that I would have sold it within 18 months of buying it BUT, the heap, even while under warranty, had so many faults, it could not pass a vehicle road worthy inspection, so it could not be put up for sale.
The heap was just over 3 years old when I finally got enough working on the heap to get a road worthy certificate to allow me to sell the heap.
I had it listed on Carsales for about 3 weeks and had a number of potential buyers interested, when I went out to got to the post office and the suspension failed once again.
I had to remove it from sale and by this time, enough was enough, my wife and I decided that we could not risk having two new vehicles not being protected by a manufacturer’s warranty and we sold her 13 month old D4.
This RR heap has now cost me close to $250,000 for a vehicle that has never worked properly.
Since 1997 we have had 6 new Land Rovers and would have still been buying new Land Rovers except for the lack of warranty backing.
7 of the last 10 years we had two new LRs at the same time.
We would have been changing our vehicles on an average of about 1 every 2 years and by now I would have updated my 07 RR for an MY10 or MY11 model and would have been looking at updating again to another RR this year.
Thats $400,000 of lost sales. My wife would have upgraded her D4 to at least another D4. Another $100,000 in lost sales.
Last year a good mate was seriously looking at a new D4 as he was considering trying out some genuine off roading. He was try to decide if he would just get a Subaru Forester and not both with full on off roading, to go whole hog and get a D4.
He had already decided that if he was to go whole hog, the D4 was the only 4x4 he would consider.
About this time, the front air suspension on my heap completely failed and the heap was not drivable. He bought the Subaru. Go figure?
I got the heap going again, thanks to help from members here and on the fullfatrr forum and actually had 5 weeks of "NEAR" faultless driving.
Too much to hope for, my heap again failed over Christmas, and at the time another mate had crawled around under the heap to see if the problem might have been something simple, like a universal failure, which he could fix for me.
He too was going to update his company vehicle from his Pajero to a D4, and he was already making enquiries to buy the D4.
When, after trucking my heap off to get it repaired, I was taking to him and told him the repair quote was $12,000.
Just this last week, he rolled up to my place in his new company vehicle. A brand new Prado. He just could not risk having similar warranty problems when he needed his vehicle for his work.
That’s a total, that I know of so far, of around $700,000 of lost sales, directly attributed to the warranty not being honoured on my RR.
From replies on other threads relating to this, there are quite a lot of other ONCE proud Land Rover owners, now driving other makes for similar reasons.
Will they ever learn?