Buying from Dealer a distance away from Home. Should I worry?

[Spriddler]

Reply deleted. Brain fade

 

[john lillie]

In a way I agree with you but realistically for minor faults what option does a customer have. Legally you can't reject a vehicle on the grounds of minor faults but you do want to get them fixed. I am always amazed at the statistics contained in vehicle road tests "build quality 75% etc". In my past life and career accuracy less than 100% had severe implications and potential disaster. if a train driver drove 75% correctly would he be going through 1 in four red signals.
But in my past two vans (both the same model and converter) 99.9% of the issues have been component related. Oh and narrowboats are not quite as mobile or fast as a camper van.

campervans don't regularly run into lock walls or concrete banks, as well as the vibrations in some cases from great big thumper slow revving diesels. 13 tonnes hitting a lock wall at 4mph is some impact!!

 

[gus-lopez]

If the motorhome is under the manufactures warranty, ie 2 years or with damp 6 years for example with Hymer, you can ask any Hymer dealer to carry out the warranty work.
For example If you bought a Mercedes in Edinburgh and subsequently moved to Devon you can still have the manufacturers warranty carried out in Devon. Hopefully that is slightly clearer. I do not know if a ‘dealer’ warranty is transferable, I am just referring to a manufacturers warranty.

Yes you can that is what people are saying but the problem is you will be given a date so far in the future that it would be out of warranty before it arrived. Most do not wish to work on something they haven't sold.
What the foreigner on holiday wanting a warranty repair does is anybodies guess?

but she could hardly get any company to take her on for the new van she was buying and her premium went up six fold and she was paying over £2,200 when she did. Also her excesses were enormous!! Off topic but surely something to think about.

Which is what UK insurance has now come down to. Insurance of any type,is & always was ,a gamble between you & the company. They assess the risk overall & give you a premium. You accept it hoping never to use it.
When you do it is, & always was & still should be, accepted as they've lost out on the gamble & it is balanced out by those who have not claimed.
Your premium should rarely rise.
That is how it always worked but now in the UK they are just scammers who wish to have a win -win situation all the time. Here you get paid out , one of those things & the premium rarely goes up.

I'd take it to someone local and pay myself (out of the money I saved on the purchase price).

Which is what @GWAYGWAY did & was then told he had negated totally the rest of the Hymer warranty ,I believe.

 

[Spriddler]

Which is what @GWAYGWAY did & was then told he had negated totally the rest of the Hymer warranty ,I believe.

Hmm, that's a point. I've never had a new m/h only m/bikes and cars where there's usually a main dealer reasonably close by.

 

[Minxy]

Which is what @GWAYGWAY did & was then told he had negated totally the rest of the Hymer warranty ,I believe.

Not knowing the exact details of GW's issue I can't be confident on his particular case but if the repairs he had done were NOT an attributable factor to a future warranty claim (assuming the warranty itself was still in place, ie hab checks had been done as required by Hymer) then a warranty claim should not be rejected, so why was he told his warranty had been negated?

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[Minxy]

If the motorhome is under the manufactures warranty, ie 2 years or with damp 6 years for example with Hymer, you can ask any Hymer dealer to carry out the warranty work.
For example If you bought a Mercedes in Edinburgh and subsequently moved to Devon you can still have the manufacturers warranty carried out in Devon. Hopefully that is slightly clearer. I do not know if a ‘dealer’ warranty is transferable, I am just referring to a manufacturers warranty.

You have been 'lucky' ... in my experience, and a lot other other people's too, if you don't buy a MH from the dealer you want to do any warranty, repair or servicing work done by, they won't give you the time of day.

 

[pandas]

You have been 'lucky' ... in my experience, and a lot other other people's too, if you don't buy a MH from the dealer you want to do any warranty, repair or servicing work done by, they won't give you the time of day.

Yes I have been very lucky in life. If there was an anxiety about future servicing and warranty work I would have a chat with a couple of alternative local dealers who you might want to use and then you wouldn't be left making a decision based on speculation - plenty of opinions on this forum.

 

[GSD]

If the motorhome is under the manufactures warranty, ie 2 years or with damp 6 years for example with Hymer, you can ask any Hymer dealer to carry out the warranty work.
For example If you bought a Mercedes in Edinburgh and subsequently moved to Devon you can still have the manufacturers warranty carried out in Devon. Hopefully that is slightly clearer. I do not know if a ‘dealer’ warranty is transferable, I am just referring to a manufacturers warranty.[/QUOTE

Thanks for clarifying what you were saying. I get it now.
However as has been touched on by others above invoking the warranty process (which I think would be needed to get another franchised dealer to pick up work) may be overkill and impracticable for a small repair albeit one outwith the scope of an owners own capabilities. And snagging tends to be a number of small(ish) things but if you are unlucky can be big things.

Essentially your contract is with the supplying dealer and your rights against him are governed by statute (mainly The Consumer Rights Act 2015) as modified by the sales contract (which cannot however take away statutory rights). The manufacturers warranty is what it is (there may be a base vehicle warranty and a converters warranty so already a crack through which the base vehicle manufacturer may choose to slip. For example my last van started making grunting noises from the front suspension when less than six months old. To try to save grief for the convertor I first approached the manufacturer The local garage for the base vehicle a very large national organisation headed up by a recently deceased knight gleefully pronounced £750 to replace top mounts and struts on each side. Not covered by warranty as it is a wearing part. Citroen were also dismissive and quoted non-existent warranty wording (later agreeing it was "policy" not wording). At this point with the consent of the supplying convertor (dealer) a friend in the trade stripped down the suspension and fixed the problem which had apparently arisen from an alteration to the design of the bump stops. The cost was two hours labour which the "dealer" happily paid.[/QUOTE]

 

[Molls-Phot]

This is something we did and would never do again. We purchased a van at the NEC show from a dealer several hundred miles away from us. The van required a lot of warranty work. We were fortunate to have two local dealers who agreed to take it on, even though they were not obliged to. Lesson learned!

 

[GWAYGWAY]

What happened to me was Lowdham's bull I had the roof leak done by them but the garage fault was put down at first by me as being poor seating rubber seal.. When I did the measuring of the door aperture and finding the door was fine but the hole was too big.
It was ok at the top but the whole body tapered away at the base by 6 mm and the rubber never actually touched the door frame. I told them about it, and they said it would need to go back to Huddersfield again (from Dover) and be left for about 6 weeks whilst they got around to it.
I thought that is two vehicles, 600 miles for the van and 1200 for the car just to fix a body fault. I had already decided that I could redo the whole back part and space it out by that much and fix it that way. I did the whole job in less than one day using one whole tube of sikaflex to replace the load that was packed into the floor area to make it one piece. The biggest job was cutting the old solid sikaseal out to allow the back panel to be me moved closer to the door. Easy job really but then I told them I had done it, the woman at the dealers said by doing an unauthorised repair I had broken the Hymer conditions of warranty and that it would deny me any more claims on the vehicle. As It is now perfectly watertight and secure I was happy at that and they could go sing. All I did was set it up the same, as the man should have done in the first place in the Factory. A few things that Hymer forgot on that van Seal and screw the rain deflector allowing water on the bed, Bad fitting door aperture and the forgetting to seal the left side windows and vents (Left side man, not in work that day???) Right side man overworked and not fitting door to garageproperly?????????
I would not be buying another Hymer, from them should I ever need to change it.. I know it inside and out so will probably keep it until either me or the van drops dead.

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[Minxy]

What happened to me was Lowdham's bull I had the roof leak done by them but the garage fault was put down at first by me as being poor seating rubber seal.. When I did the measuring of the door aperture and finding the door was fine but the hole was too big.
It was ok at the top but the whole body tapered away at the base by 6 mm and the rubber never actually touched the door frame. I told them about it, and they said it would need to go back to Huddersfield again (from Dover) and be left for about 6 weeks whilst they got around to it.
I thought that is two vehicles, 600 miles for the van and 1200 for the car just to fix a body fault. I had already decided that I could redo the whole back part and space it out by that much and fix it that way. I did the whole job in less than one day using one whole tube of sikaflex to replace the load that was packed into the floor area to make it one piece. The biggest job was cutting the old solid sikaseal out to allow the back panel to be me moved closer to the door. Easy job really but then I told them I had done it, the woman at the dealers said by doing an unauthorised repair I had broken the Hymer conditions of warranty and that it would deny me any more claims on the vehicle. As It is now perfectly watertight and secure I was happy at that and they could go sing. All I did was set it up the same, as the man should have done in the first place in the Factory. A few things that Hymer forgot on that van Seal and screw the rain deflector allowing water on the bed, Bad fitting door aperture and the forgetting to seal the left side windows and vents (Left side man, not in work that day???) Right side man overworked and not fitting door to garageproperly?????????
I would not be buying another Hymer, from them should I ever need to change it.. I know it inside and out so will probably keep it until either me or the van drops dead.

Thanks for the info but I suspect that unless any future claim was for a problem in the same area that the repair was carried out Hymer would have a difficult time refusing to carry out a repair as they'd have to be able to say categorically that your repair caused the new issue. Just because the woman at the dealer's said you have invalidated the warranty doesn't mean that would be Hymer's stance on it ... I certainly wouldn't take her word for it.

 

[pandas]

What happened to me was Lowdham's bull I had the roof leak done by them but the garage fault was put down at first by me as being poor seating rubber seal.. When I did the measuring of the door aperture and finding the door was fine but the hole was too big.
It was ok at the top but the whole body tapered away at the base by 6 mm and the rubber never actually touched the door frame. I told them about it, and they said it would need to go back to Huddersfield again (from Dover) and be left for about 6 weeks whilst they got around to it.
I thought that is two vehicles, 600 miles for the van and 1200 for the car just to fix a body fault. I had already decided that I could redo the whole back part and space it out by that much and fix it that way. I did the whole job in less than one day using one whole tube of sikaflex to replace the load that was packed into the floor area to make it one piece. The biggest job was cutting the old solid sikaseal out to allow the back panel to be me moved closer to the door. Easy job really but then I told them I had done it, the woman at the dealers said by doing an unauthorised repair I had broken the Hymer conditions of warranty and that it would deny me any more claims on the vehicle. As It is now perfectly watertight and secure I was happy at that and they could go sing. All I did was set it up the same, as the man should have done in the first place in the Factory. A few things that Hymer forgot on that van Seal and screw the rain deflector allowing water on the bed, Bad fitting door aperture and the forgetting to seal the left side windows and vents (Left side man, not in work that day???) Right side man overworked and not fitting door to garageproperly?????????
I would not be buying another Hymer, from them should I ever need to change it.. I know it inside and out so will probably keep it until either me or the van drops dead.

You are not alone about the issues - rain deflector leaking water and both garage doors have been post formed at the the wrong angle at the bottom section so they don't fit snug against the seals - dealers sorting it though and being responsive. Post production quality control has been poor from Hymer and others judging by the posts. With the reluctance of dealers doing warranty work, indicated by the comments by some on this forum, there must be too many motorhomes with too few dealer workshops - business opportunity out there for somebody.

 

[Lenny HB]

What the foreigner on holiday wanting a warranty repair does is anybodies guess?

It does appear to be a Rip off Britian problem.
If you have a German van and have a problem anywhere other than the UK just go into any dealer and they will help you, I know I've done it.

 

[Lenny HB]

A lot of the problems from comes UK dealers ripping customers off for £60-£80 an hour and only getting £45 an hour for warranty work. Whereas abroad they only charge the customer £45 an hour so it makes no difference to them if it's warranty work or not.