#Loaner

The other day, we posed the question of whether you’ve ever regretted lending your vehicle to another individual. Not hard to see how something could go wrong in a hurry in that situation; God knows we’re a flawed species. Hopefully the memories weren’t too painful.

Perhaps less soul-destroying is what we’ve come here today to ask. While this has everything to do with the loaning of personal property to another, the situation is reversed. And the “friend” element is, for the most part, gone.

We’ve all dropped our ride off at the dealer or the local mechanic for necessary surgery (or BS servicing required to keep the warranty intact), and not all of us had a friend, spouse, or bus waiting to take us back home or to work that morning. Instead, we were handed the key to a wholly unfamiliar car.

Just a couple of months ago, GM quietly announced their factory 5 year/100k mile powertrain warranty was going to henceforth be downgraded to a 60k mile powertrain warranty because their cars are all fine now and customers don’t care about long-term warranties.

About 48 hours after this was announced, my wife found herself limping along the side of a major road in our 2010 Malibu with 90k miles on the odometer, engine revving, but little transmission of power taking place between the engine and the wheels.

A few days ago, we reported that Toyota had caved in to demands of the Commerce Bureau and the Consumer Protection Committee of China’s Zhejiang Province. Under the agreement, Toyota will reimburse Zhejiang customers for losses sustained from the RAV4 recall. Toyota will send people to pick up and deliver the affected vehicles, and will provide a loaner while the car is in the shop. The whole thing was started by New York’s AG Andrew Cuomo who strong-armed Toyota into supplying similar services to recall-affected residents of the Empire State. The Zhejiang-accord had The Nikkei [sub] worried: “Such an agreement could lead to demands for similar deals from customers in not only other provinces, but also other countries.” It didn’t take long.