Sign of the Times: Badvertising Edition
What do you do when your £50,000 ($82,000) Range Rover requires, in the span of 42,000 miles, the following repairs?
- Six front ball joints;
- Four front arm bushes [bushings?];
- One new seat base;
- Front and rear [near side?] struts;
- Air conditioning system;
- Anti-roll bar bushes; and
- A “full” suspension unit
According to the Daily Mail, if you’re a Colchester, Essex, UK, man, you invest a bit of money in some vinyl decals, adorn your POS Range Rover with them, park it in front of the dealer and leave it there for any and all dealership visitors to see. And, because you’ve parked it on a public street, the dealership has no recourse to have the vehicle removed!
Workers at the dealership refused to identify the owner of the lemon. A spokesman for Jaguar – Land Rover says that all the repairs for the Range Rover have been performed under warranty and adds, “However, we are disappointed this customer’s experience has been unfortunate and as such we have made a goodwill offer towards helping him into a new vehicle.”
A generous offer on the face of it, but what about the man’s time and aggravation? Is that only worth a new Jaguar or a new Range Rover? Good luck to Mr. Anonymous.
Early 30s California guy driving a 97 Infiniti I30. Past cars: 90 Cavalier, 82 Skylark, 78 Courier, 61 Beetle.
More by Jeff Puthuff
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@ Bimmer: While the "C" in TTAC is for cars, not computers, my experience with Seagate HDD has been so bad [the other brand to avoid, pretty easy, because they don't make them any more, was the Yugo-quality IBM "Deskstar" SCSI drive, fondly known as the "Deathstar", which ate up years of my data] that to this day, whenever purchasing computers or parts, I insist that the brand not be Seagate/Maxstor. Which makes me wonder, what brand is the HDD in my BMW that supports the nav system?
Reliability is a funny thing that is more based on perception and expectation than it is on statisics. It's a strange thing that Toyota always rate at the top of consumer quality, but seem to have as many if not more safety recalls as anyone else. http://www.recalls.gov.au/content/index.phtml/itemId/952855/fromItemId/952839 I think people overlook a lot of stuff that goes wrong with Toyotas.