You'd think that when you've got Land Rover warranty...

[Farmerfred]

Some insurance Companies offer in their policy a courtesy or hire vehicle if under the policy you are covered for breakdown.

[Cynic-al]

I could gripe about main dealers all day long, it's not just Land Rover I'm afraid. I've had awful experiences with Ford, Citroen, Nissan, Vauxhall, BMW etc etc. I find the manufacturer is only involved with the vehicle up to the point when it is sold. After that you are dealing with an employee of a garage owned by a chain and any work has to be approved by an employee of a warranty company who have been paid a fee by the manufacturer to take on the financial risk of mechanical problems a bit like we buy insurance to take on the financial risk of an accident. To get anything done you have to convince the employee of the dealership, whom is a fully qualified telephone answerer but has no mechanical or vehicular knowledge whatsoever, that your point is valid, who then has to convey that message to a manager, whom has a degree in paper shuffling but also no mechanical or vehicular knowledge and convince them the idiot PITA customer has a valid point, they then have to convince the warranty company employee, who is a degree qualified database searcher, but has no mechanical or vehicular knowledge, that your claim is valid, which, if accepted, will cover the cost of parts and labour for your vehicle but not enough labour for the mechanic (who actually has no mechanical training but is internally qualified to read a code machine and nut an bolt the part that it decides is faulty) to actually complete the job in hand which leads to immense corner cutting and maximum disinterest at all levels.

The issue of you wanting a loan vehicle capable of doing the job of the faulty vehicle for the duration of the repair or compensation to the value of has to take the same communication route from telephone jockey to paper shuffler, but then has to take a detour to group head office where their telephone jockey has to receive, decipher, encode and translate message to their paper shuffler, who then has to obtain a decision from their boss who understands pounds and pence but not mechanics, cars or common sense. The whole storey then has to Chinese whisper back to the first telephone jockey who, unless every person in that chain actually gives a flying... reports that the computer says no.

Dealers which I have had good experience are St Ledger Isuzu (no longer in existence) who rewired the standard fit tow bar to the way I like it rather than the standard approved way FOC after fitting, Doncaster Hyundai who convinced the warranty company to fix damage to my bumper even though it looked like I'd hit something and gave a loan car off the forecourt as they didn't have any available FOC and Doncaster Mercedes who replaced a faulty steering rack on a work car even though the car was out of warranty for only the cost of the part and hired a higher spec car for the driver whilst it was in FOC.

[Farmerfred]

I think that main dealers and one make suppliers of vehicles have a better and more comprehensive warrantee 'package' which will most likely be on a sliding scale of cover and term of cover depending on the age and mileage of the vehicle you're buying, where problems start is when you buy a vehicle from a general dealer that supplies all and any make, the warrantee that they supply will be a lot less comprehensive and if anything does go wrong this is when they start to try and wriggle out of things. The warrantee that these offer are usually from a third party Company. That was the experience I had once with the viscous fan seizing on a Defender and when I took it back to where I bought the Defender from the bloke said it was not covered, although it was well within the three months, I gave him a piece of my mind about the warrantee and never went back there again!

[pat_pending]

If you have a mobile phone, and it breaks under warranty, you take it back to the shop, they either replace it, or send it off to be repaired depending on how old it is.

If it goes off for repair they give you a basic phone that will get you by in the meantime, at no cost.

I think this is where HOG is coming from, and honestly I can see exactly why he's a little peeved he has to pay for a car when JLR are rectifying a fault within the vehicle warranty.

How manufacturers treat their franchises is not really the issue here, it's how JLR expect their customers to be OK with this....

I understand where HOG coming from, I was pointing out there's always another side to the coin.

JLR are not in fact doing anything, an independent dealer that holds the L/R franchise is looking at the vehicle for a problem that's potentially covered under warranty.

If the fault is covered, then following repair, JLR will reimburse the dealer (at a warranty rate that's less than the standard retail labour rate) for the cost of the repair.

In the mean time the Dealer is obliged to supply a courtesy car.

Whether there are any charges involved in that is a financial/commercial decision made by the dealer. Any charges should have been explained fully at the time. At that point there is always scope for negotiation, or indeed taking the vehicle elsewhere.

Also a couple of posts seem to be confusing a manufactures warranty given on a new car and the "warranty" supplied by a separate company usually given with a used car.

The former is where the manufacturer warrants the vehicle against defects, the latter is a mechanical breakdown insurance.

They are very different things.

[dailysleaze]

It may be exacerbated by the fact that there are not going to be any Defender repeat customers from now on.

[Cynic-al]

When the dmax was launched isuzu deliberately tried to get independant land rover dealers to sell their product so that defender owners would see their product and consider it when they could no longer buy defenders.

It's not just dealers either. A farmer relation once had an attempted theft of his pickup and nfu took it away for repairs giving him a micra as a courtesy car. The specialist farmers insurance company didn't seem to understand the problem when he wanted to know where he was going to put his 4 workers and a diesel tank on Monday morning when he wanted to take them to their machines.

[BogMonster]

Having spent 15 years as a dealer principal I can also confirm that the 'deal' with being a dealership is pretty dire. You are supposed to hold lots of specialist stuff that you pay through the nose for (15 grand for a Windows laptop and a box of cables) and then when you do warranty work, you make a loss on it most of the time. You make a profit on other activities and then have to subsidise a load of stuff out of that which aren't costs that any non dealership workshop has. The customer experience is not right, but the folks who abuse the loan vehicle as some have described above and think it's funny just ruin it for everybody else because somebody, somewhere, has a cost to meet for that behaviour. The factory fund precisely none of it.

Most UK based LR never see any mud, so an ordinary car is probably fine for 95% of the courtesy requirements, and would anybody say that would happily have paid an extra £1000 on the price of their car to get a like for like courtesy car? It has to be funded somehow.

I suppose the reality is that maybe 5% of customers are probably really p***ed off by their experience and don't return, but in the grand scheme of things, that is survivable if the other 95% do, and like most things, the cost uplift to keep the 5% happy is not economic.

I have no current dealership connections, just been there done that!

[Happyoldgit]

Update:

Different dealer, 15 quid one off fee to cover a Land Rover courtesy vehicle for however long warranty investigations / repairs take. Obviously I'm agreeable to that as opposed to being charged the same amount + VAT per day.

[pat_pending]

Update:

Different dealer, 15 quid one off fee to cover a Land Rover courtesy vehicle for however long warranty investigations / repairs take. Obviously I'm agreeable to that as opposed to being charged the same amount + VAT per day.

That sounds more reasonable.

Hope they get the problem sorted.