Thread: When is a warranty not a warranty.

Hi BigJon and here are some tips for you.

You need to have the transmission overhauled no longer than 100,000 to 120,000 kms.

Note, this is not a service but a number of components have to be replaced, because the Australian heat apparently is causing a lot of premature failures.

This one is a bit weird but be prepared to have your alternator REPLACED at around 100,000.

Mine failed at about that mileage and then I read on the FullFat forum that this is a common problem with the 07 model.

Go figure that one?

I was unaware of this alternator problem and had mine rebuilt, but this may not have been such a good thing.

Mine is now off the road and probably for good as my wife is refusing to even ride in it, let alone drive it any more. It is just too dangerous.

So no need to hurry to fix the heap.

I am aware of potential alternator issues, JC has replaced one.
I have done one oil and filter change on the trans and will do so regularly. If it fails I will cross that bridge when I come to it.

Owing to the fact my wife is too scared to even ride in my RR, I have taken a few months to put the RR in to be fixed.

I have just received a phone call, informing me that the RR’s gearbox and transfer case have to be rebuilt.

The mechanic told me the “Spline” is bone dry and has NEVER had any form of lubricant applied to it, and it has come from the factory that way.

The mechanic is a Land Rover trained mechanic and he told me that there should have been a type of lubricant. He did give me the name but it went over my head.

He stated that with time, while the lubricant can be hard to see on the spline, there is always some evidence of some on the seals.

In my RR’s case, he told me there is absolutely no evidence of any form of lubrication and he was very specific when he told me it had come from the factory that way, because the seals are bone dry.

I have received the quote to fit yet another one of Land Rover’s incompetent build problems, and it’s a $12,000 fix that is not going to be done as the vehicle is a bomb and was made that way.

I have had enough and have instructed that the RR be reassembled and tow trucked back to me while I now investigate my legal avenues.

In just over 6 years of owning this heap, it has come close to operating properly for just 5 weeks and that occurred just before last Christmas, thanks to some great feedback and assistance from members here and from the UK site.

While following the advice obtained here and the UK site, I got the RR to work, but only after discovering a faulty plug assembly in the compressor. Again, something that had come from the factory and was never fixed under warranty ( not that I ever received a warranty ), even though the faulty suspension was raised repeatedly at numerous services.

I wonder if the dry spline problem is the same one that Davis Performance Landies found in D3s some 4 years ago.

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?