Bangertorial

Bangertorial February 2010

Kia’s 7 Year Warranty has a 7 Year Hitch

Here is my One Careful Owner Column in full and unedited....

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It is now confirmed that you and I will be subsidising the European and Japanese car industries with our hard earned. Although the government may despise the industry, it is only just beginning to realise that rather a lot of livelihoods depend on it. Their normal reaction would normally be to poke us with sticks in a showroom like direction, but instead all the panicking company car bosses are pleading for them to go a bit softer and bribe us with our own money.

Do you really think that someone happily running a reliable old dog of a car is going to suddenly be excited that it is worth £2000 and he/she will happily offset that against the £10K+ plus required to replace it. No, Bangernomics is a way of life and buying a depreciating asset is just not on the agenda for those of us who believing in wringing the maximum amount of value out of our cars.

Even if you do buy new and are used to getting some money off then won’t those discounts disappear or be absorbed somehow into the new assisted price drop? I can see the dealer using the scheme as the perfect excuse not to discount at all, but point to a big poster from the Dept of Transport and the Environment saying £2K for your old banger, even though they have to subsidise the scheme with £1000 of their own.

Of course the argument is that all this will get the car market turning over again problem, but although it may well help pay a sales executive’s salary, some business rates, VAT and corporation tax and all that, quite a lot of cash goes to those who actually make the cars in Europe or Japan. So if we are going to have a scrappage scheme, why can’t their be strings attached?

The strings would be that only UK built cars qualify, so those models made by Honda, Nissan, Toyota and Jaguar Land Rover would be included. Obviously it should also apply to Morgan, Bristol, Caterham and Aerial if we are going to play fair. Europe may not see it that way.

I say, scrap any scrappage schemes. Manufacturers should discount their way out of this and then have a big rethink. It’s not our fault and in the words of Mr Brown, I don’t want to reward failure...stop press: Sadly we are rewarding failure and the Scrap Scheme is a poorly thought out reality.

Just Say No to the Scrap Scheme. You’ll save more than Two Grand, in fact for £2K get yourself a perfectly decent Banger, the kind the Government wants to kill off. The book on the left is called The Waste Makers by Vance Packard and he had right in 1961 about building cars one year and making them obsolete the next.

BRING BACK THE ‘80s

For some of us (who weren’t miners, or even minors below the driving age) it was the finest decade known to humanity and one day I well write a book about it. It would certainly be better than some half-baked Taches to Crashes time travel TV nonsense that pretends to tell it like it may have been. I never met a copper in anything more exciting or more likely to break down than Rover SD1, so a Quattro remained a constabulary wet dream. For the rest of us in the real world we had the pick of some sensational stuff.

For a start this was one Mercedes built cars properly. They weren’t all hugely exciting of course but a 560 SEL at full ramming speed was an incredible sight. You could though get Alpina’d 7 series which you really could throw around with wild abandon. Most of those Alpinas went abroad, but you can still turn up a 560 for around a grand and it will still work. I won’t bore you about E Class taxis when what you really wanted was a chuckable 528i in square rigged E28 shape. Downsizing a 190 was ruthlessly efficient, but until the arrival of the Cosworth version the 3 series really was the Guv’nor. It still is. You can still find game old girls who bought their 325is in 1987 and haven’t found anything since that comes close. In two-door saloon form, no they never were coupes, despite what the classified ad writers say, and all the better for it.

Audis were always hugely underrated in the 1970s and Quattro aside the 100LS was lovely and the 80 only really showed potential. And yes that is right all the brilliant cars from the finest decade known to humanity were indeed German, no argument. Indeed the very best car ever built back then was obviously the Mark 2 Volkswagen Golf GTI, the 8 valve one. And I don’t think that is even up for discussion.

Scrappage isn’t working, could also be the title of this piece. The following article should have appeared in a national magazine, but it was spiked, cancelled in non journalisticspeak. It was then offered to their website, also turned down and a major motoring website, who also turned down. It seems there is too much advertising to lose and also motor industry PR spin to be compromised by highlighting any real issues...Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

I don’t quite know what we would do without the scrappage scheme to entertain us, what with all these perfectly good cars being sent to the crusher, which defies any sort of logic. Then there are the ‘70s and ‘80s classics, which on moral grounds don’t deserve to be described as a nail. Their death, even the Morris Marina, proves that certain people certainly know the price of old Bangers, which is £1000 from the taxpayer and £1000+ from the manufacturer, but not their actual spiritual and historical value. Essentially the scrappage scheme has brought out the worst in people and simply resulted in mean old people sending their children’s inheritance to Germany and the Far East. They always could afford a Kia, actually they could easily buy a Morgan Aero, but simply choose not to. Presumably because Morgan aren’t participating in the scheme.

So according to Bangernomics Car Magazine readers who admit to being in their autumn years they really don’t care who is paying for what in all this and are just delighted to get themselves a whopping discount. So a Hyundai i30, which would normally cost £11,495, is now £3500 lighter. That is thanks to the ‘grand from the government’, which I think is us tax payers and £2500 from those nice people at Hyundai. That’s £7995, when you can find second hand ones nudging £9000. A decade Ford Mondeo was sacrificed for the i30 when it could have run for a few more years.

Less happy are Bangernomics Magazine readers after a Golf. Volkswagen increased the scrappage money on this car and then told everyone all about it. Trouble is there aren’t any around in showrooms. That’s a problem because the rules of the government scheme state that there cannot be a gap of more than 4 months between ordering and delivery. So no scrap money on a Golf then. Maybe some money off a Phaeton then? Presumably an overwhelmed VW could be ramping up production for later in the year when the money runs out.

Just in case you wondered what else was selling, apart from Hyundais and Kias, it also seems that Toyota are in the money. That’s because they have reduced their lead time on an Aygo from 4 months to 2 months, so a customer can get a new Aygo with £1700 scrappage money, which is a fabulous deal. According to my sources buyers are going for the 'Blue' special edition. Also the latest spec Yaris 1.33 TR2 is selling well and that gets £1750 of financial support to a manufacturing industry that er, isn’t based in Britain.

STOP PRESS: Bangernomics reader noted that price of a Nissan Pixo was to be £6000 so booked with his local dealer for a test drive. He intended to part exchange his 22 year old MG Maestro and pay £4000. Salesman said that the price of the basic car had risen by £1000. He had an argument on the spot and the upshot is that a 22 year old MG Maestro is still alive and well. Some good news then.

Don’t Panic this MG Maestro has been saved from the scrapper because a manufacturer has been a teeny bit greedy. A great ‘80s car

Compare

I am extremely irritated by a recent Hyundai press release. Apparently they loaned out three old Rovers to motoring hacks. According to the company ‘wanted to give journalists a taste of what it's like to drive an old car day-in, day out. So we sent them a ‘snotter’ for a few days instead of a nice new press car.’ As I don’t get nice new press cars I only found out about the scheme when it was all over. For the hacks involved it makes a nice ‘now and then’ type story plus it was sugar coated by donations to charity (Women on the Move Against Cancer) £20 for every 100 miles covered. So to criticize those generous people at Hyundai is probably the wrong thing to as £750 was raised, but I don’t care.

To me the underlying message of this is just how stupid and misguided it is to own an older car.

Rover is a fantastically easy target as they don’t exist anymore. Surely they could have playfully submitted an old Escort, or Pony. Now I can criticize old Rovers and certainly have done, not least because I’ve put my own taxes into the company. I still have a sense of humour, but I do think it is disrespectful for a foreign car company to have a go at my, admittedly flawed, motoring heritage.

In Twitterdom I have had industry PRs telling me how uncomfortable, unsafe and unreliable old cars are. They truly believe that old cars are rubbish, which in some cases they obviously are and have questioned whether I would actually put a member of family in an old car. Well I do. I actually ‘drive old cars day in, day out.’

There is a slightly happy ending in that a fellow hack called Keith Adams (go to www.austin-rover.co.uk) saved two of Hyundai’s scrappage fleet. A Metro and a 214.

So am I feeling a tad over sensitive about this, just an irritated old man or do I have a point?

And my previous anti scrappage rants can be read below...

We have got the Newspress New Media Award. It won’t change us though, even though Bangernomics now drives a Jaguar. I think we may have got the award be because we don’t take anything too seriously apart from the stupidity of the scrappage scheme and the madness of buying new if you can’t actually afford or don’t actually need to. Bangernomics would like to say thank you very much...

Kia have done very well for themselves recently. If you wanted a manufacturer to give you two grand for your old banger and get something cheap and cheerful in return, they were your best mates. Now they are giving buyers four more years of warranty cover for up to 100K miles, which seems generous until you look a bit closer.

To Kia’s credit the warranty documents are understandable without reams of treacherous small print. Kia told me that it is ‘a standard warranty offering, but longer’. So they are not claiming that the Kia warranty is any better than any other manufacturer, however they are not actually offering very much more than the competition. In fact it’s a seven-year soundbite.

I know this because I have been speaking to independent warranty experts in general and Warranty Direct in particular. Obviously they are going to approach the issue from their own business self interest, but confirmed that the Kia seven year warranty isn’t all it seems. The basic principle is if anything wears out in the warranty period it is not going to be covered, but if something breaks due to a manufacturing fault, then it is.

The big problem is that the ‘standard’ warranty offering is fine for the first 3 years, most of the manufacturing faults have been ironed out by then but when a car reaches 6 years and 80,000 miles it won’t offer much protection. Few items are going to wear out during the initial three-year period. Indeed, if something did then that would more than likely be replaced as a good will claim. The failure of any significant mechanical or electrical part would probably be deemed unreasonable. When a car gets to four, five and six years old then you do get parts which are going to fail because of wear and tear. These of course won’t be covered by Kia, however manufacturing faults would be.

Now that sounds all very reasonable so far, but in effect Kia are not offering much in the way of extra cover. However, they argue that they are standing by the quality of their vehicles for longer than the rest. Except that when there is an intrinsic fault with any car, whatever the age it will become subject to the recall system.

Duncan McClure Fisher MD of Warranty Direct is so convinced that Kia owners are going to be left exposed that at the time of writing he was putting together a warranty package to better protect them.

Don’t think that this will be the last we hear about Kia’s seven year hitch.

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