Originally Posted by
drivesafe
I have already posted up my dislike of my latest and most likely, last Land Rover, but I think it’s time people heard just how pathetic Land Rover Australia is when it comes the warranty responsibility, and not just with my vehicle!
My problems with this heap started just 24 hours after driving out of the showroom.
One of the first tasks I tried to do was set up the Voice Commands for the mobile phone.
I tried for about an hour without any success and then thought it my be my old mobile phone causing the problem so I bought a new.
No luck, and things just went down hill from there.
6 weeks ago, after being invited by LRA to join them on their Facebook site, I was telling one of my customers about it and I suggested I should post up the good work LRA and the dealership have did on my RR while it was supposedly still under warranty.
My customer is a solicitor and he then informed that if a fault is not fixed under warranty, and the dealership/manufacture is aware of the fault during the warranty period, they are still responsible for fault repair after the warranty expires.
When I was informed of this, I first contacted Land Rover Australia and sent them the following E-mail to see if these problems could be resolved in a simple manor.
This was sent 6 weeks ago and so far not a single reply other than the automatically generated “Thank you for your E-mail, you will be contacted within two days”
Anyway I am interested in any feed back on how others have been treated by Land Rover, in relations to warranty claims.
MY E-MAIL TO LRA.
I received an E-mail from you ( Land Rover ) last week, inviting me to visit you on Twitter and Facebook.
I personally find this invitation somewhat strange considering I am anything but a happy Land Rover owner.
Let me start by covering my history of once being a loyal Land Rover owner.
I began my Land Rover experience back in the mid 1990s, and bought a Discovery 1, the first of 6 new Land Rovers.
I then traded up to a Discovery 2, and then in 2002, I bought the best vehicle I have ever owned, a Range Rover Vogue. I bought the Ranger Rover just 2 months after the new L322 range was released here in Australia.
In 2004, as a founding member, I and a hand full of other Land Rover enthusiasts, after meeting up on the AULRO forum, formed the Gold Coast Land Rover Owners club of which I am member number 3.
Thanks to the clubs activities, I had me 2002 Range Rover off road every opportunity I could.
Then in 2005, my wife bought a Discovery 3, another excellent 4x4 and when the Discovery 4 was released, she traded up to one.
Then I made the two biggest motoring blunders of my life.
In 2007, while in Melbourne on a business trip, with just short of 180,000 kilometres on the clock, I decided to up grade my 2002 RR for a new 2007 Range Rover Vogue Lux.
Trading the 2002 RR in was the first mistake. and buying the 2007 RR Lux was the second and bigger mistake.
The 2007 Range Rover Vogue has to be worst vehicle I have ever owned and has had the worst warranty of any vehicle I have ever owned.
Right from the start, this vehicle has been a boom, but even before I took charge of it it was causing problems.
I bought the 2007 RR from *********, and as above, I was in Melbourne on a business and was wanting to get home.* The paperwork took a few days, which is normal and I’m informed the RR is ready to pickup on Thursday, so I ring the dealership to organise a time, and I’m informed that as the salesman was having Thursday off, I would have to wait till Friday to collect the vehicle.
This is what they call good customer relations, and was an oman of worse to come.
I had organised Transfer Papers for the RR so I could drive it back to Queensland before registering it.
I drove straight through to the Gold Coast and got back over the weekend. On the Monday morning I go to the Motor Registry and while the inspector was writing down the engine number, she pointed at the top of the radiator and commented “I don’t think that belongs there”.
Sitting on top of the radiator fan cover was the oil dip stick. The great service staff at *********** had forgotten to replace the dip stick and I had just driven nearly 2,000ks with an open engine oil pipe.
This was just the beginning of the hassles this vehicle has caused.
After a few months, the 07 RR would not allow manual selection of lower gears. It performed flawlessly while driving but just would not allow manual selection in Sports mode.
This went on for a few weeks then suddenly and with no apparent reason, it was back working again. And while it was reported at the next service, it was never fixed and to this day, the manual selection works for a few months then it is not available for a few months.
The same thing happens to the Terrain Response and this has proven to be such a problem that in nearly 6 years of owning a 4x4 and originally being an active member of a Land Rover club, my RR has only been off road 3 times.
Now there was supposed to be a 3 year new vehicle warranty covering my RR, so when I noticed that the leather in the side of my driver’s seat was being cut by the plastic cowling around the base of the seat, I showed this to the service manager when I put the RR in for it’s next service at Bruce Lynton LR.
When I picked up my RR, I’m informed that LRA told the service manager that this sort of damage is caused by ware and tare, and as such, is not covered under the terms of the warranty.
Being as the warranty was SUPPOSED to be for 3 years, it’s a bit of a joke, especially when considering I had not raised this problem 3 years into the warranty, my RR was not 3 months old when I asked for it to be fixed.
The “warranty” repair was done by me, having to first sand the razor sharp edge off the top of the plastic seat cowling and then, because the cowling was white plastic painted black, I then covered the white plastic with a black permanent marker.
I have now heard from a number of RRS owners, where they had had the same problem and their seats were replaced.
During the first couple of years I had this vehicle, there was a drought in Queensland, but the first time we had heavy rain, I noticed the rear window was leaking. So the next service, I showed them where the window was leaking so it could be fixed.
When I picked up my RR, I was told the leak had been fixed.
It was a year or so before the drought finally came to end and we started to get heavy rain again. I was driving with some friends in the RR and one of them tells me she can hear some sort of hissing noise in the back.
By the time I have dropped my friends off and I’m driving home, I too can now hear this periodic hissing sound.
I get home and discovered the rear window was still leaking and after some investigating to find out what was causing the hissing sound, I noticed water in the spare wheel well.
After removing the spare wheel, I then had to remove more than a bucket full of water. The hissing sound was the water splashing over the compressor.
By this time, my RR was now out of warranty, not that the warranty had ever been honored by *********** or LRA.
Every few months, after heavy rain, I would have to remove the spare and remove the water, until I finally had enough.
I found two large rubber bungs in the floor of the spare wheel well. I removed them and now, while the RR still leaks in the rain, at least the water no longer builds up in the wheel well, it just flows straight through and out under the RR.
My $170,000 RR is so useless now that it is only used for the mail run, two or three times week.
I would have sold this “4x4” years ago but there are so many faults with it, I would have been lucky to 25% of what it should be valued at.
Thanks to owning a 4x4 that is not a 4x4, I have not been an active member of the Gold Coast Land Rovers club for more than 4 years.
Another failed feature is the Telephone Voice Recognition. Over four long attempts to get this feature to operate, including a final 2 hour attempt, which at the end of it, I actually got the phone to call a number using voice command. The only problem being that it was not the number I requested, so I gave up.
The next service, I told the service manager this feature was not working and to my amazement, he informs me that there is a problem with this feature and they have actually deleted it from the UK versions.
I found this very hard to believe and then some months later, I am given the same story from the service manager of another dealership.
At that time I was driving a considerable number of kilometers every month and this “SAFETY” feature was one of the reasons I upgraded to this model. This SAFETY feature not only didn’t work but Land Rover were happy to sell their RRs claiming they had this SAFETY feature when they knew it did not work.
The sound system only partially works, the nav system worked fine till the RR had its first service, and has never worked properly since, even though I pointed out this problem every time I put the RR in for a service.
There has been an electronic glitch in this vehicle from the day it was manufactured but no matter how many problems I raised each time my RR went in for a service, the electronics issue was never resolved and I doubt if it was actually ever looked at.
My Terrain Response and Height Selection has not worked at all for the last two and a half years and 6 months ago, after the heavy rain event we had in Queensland, I was turning around in my backyard when a rear wheel sunk into some soft mud I was unaware of.
Because none of the off road features work, I could not get the RR out of the mud, so I had to get my neighbour to come and rescue my non 4x4 with her Holden Colorado real 4x4. I posted up some nice pictures of the rescue, on the AULRO forum.
My loyalty towards Land Rover finally diminished once and for all, after an incident with one of customers.
I design and manufacture dual battery systems for the RV industry and have been doing so for nearly 25 years.
My isolators operate in a completely unique way and are unlike any other isolators anywhere in the world.
Because of the unique way the operate, they actually allow the cranking battery to continue to be charged after the motor is turned off.
While this procedure was not originally a design intention. The original intention was to allow up to 50% of the cranking batteries capacity to be used by accessories being power from the auxiliary/house battery.
But I was soon made aware of the reverse charging effect when customers continually noted that they were not only getting much longer life spans from the auxiliary batteries, which was a design intention, but they were also getting much longer life spans from the cranking batteries.
Now move forward some 15 years, to the arrival of the first Discovery 3s, and through the AULRO forum, many new D3 owners purchase my dual battery kits.
Not long after after this, I get a phone call from the head of Technical Training section of LRA, and he informs me that there have been numerous incompatibility problems with many of the other dual battery isolators being used in the Discovery 3s.
He told me how he had seen the many AULRO D3 members who had my kits in their D3s and were apparently not having any problems and as such, asked if I could supply him with one of my isolators so LRA could test there effects on the new D3s.
I sent him a number of isolators and some 3 or so months later, I received an E-mail from him stating that the testing they had carried out confirmed that my isolators caused no compatibility problems with the Discovery 3. He also informed me that their findings had been forward on to the UK.
The benefit of the way my isolators allow the auxiliary battery to charge the cranking battery has proven to be a major bonus in Discovery 3s and 4s and RRS, because Land Rover, like many other new vehicle manufacturers, have been plagued with premature cranking battery failures, caused by the now common lower operating voltages of many makes of new vehicles.
Again, my systems resolved this problem and VERY FEW cranking batteries in vehicles, fitted with my isolators, fail to get through the warranty period, and most tend to last much longer than the usual life span.
Another advantage has been in D3s and D4s, where specific vehicles would continually display low battery warnings, and no matter how dealerships tried to fix the problem, the messages continued.
But within one week of installing one of my dual battery kits in these Land Rovers, the messages stopped and never appear again.
This one single advantage has saved Land Rover, world wide, because I ship my kits all over the globe, there are nearly 3,000 D3s, D4s and RRS fitted with my dual battery kit, my kits have saved Land Rover tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, because their vehicles, fitted with my dual battery systems, are far FAR less likely to suffer premature failure of their cranking batteries during the warranty period.*
But not long after the Discovery 4 is released, a customer purchased one of my kits and installs it in his new D4, and all goes well, up until he is on holidays, towing his caravan.
As above, all goes well until on a day where he had been driving for a good few hours and was driving up a grade, when the Discovery 4’s power failed.
The D4 was first trucked to the nearest dealership and when they couldn’t find the problem, it was trucked down to LRA in Sydney.
After about about two weeks of requests from the owner to find out what had caused the failure, LRA informed him his D4 had had fuel injector failure, claimed by LRA to have been caused by my dual battery system.
Not only did this not make sense, but the owner of the D4 is an electrical engineer, and he was having none of the lame excuse.
The owner was not only an electrical engineer, he made for a pretty good detective as well, because he tracked down two other identical failures, which had occurred in similar circumstances, while towing a caravan in one case and a boat in another case, and neither had dual battery systems, mine or any other.
When the truth finally came out, it seems there never was a fuel injector failure or an alleged problem supposedly caused by my dual battery system. There was a software glitch and once it was sorted, my customer has not had another problem.
It was quite obvious LRA was happy to unjustly discredit my product and potentially do some serious harm to my business, as a means for them to avoid yet another warranty responsibility.
So as stated at the beginning of this post, I find this invitation of yours, somewhat strange, but I am happy to take you up on the offer and will post this up if you think it will be of help to others.
Reply With Quotelet us know what happens unless they get you to sign a gag order
OldBushie
maybe because we had to yell and scream to get the dealer to get off his arse and fix our car, since then, they haven't been very friendly and in fact have gone out of thier way to knock back every warranty claim and even mentioning your dual battery kit as well, among other accessories
hope all this turns out well for you, Amaroks are a good thing
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