Toyota has had a rough time of it lately – entirely its own fault. The business world is replete with examples of companies founded on exceptional quality losing sight of this over the years and compromising the quality in the name of cost cutting. Anyone who’s read or listened to Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” will be familiar with the “clam chowder” story. Having watched the TV series going behind the scenes at John Lewis, I found myself wondering whether they, too, are running the risk of losing their distinctiveness in the name of cost reduction (eg “just in time” stock management is risky).
Anyway, I bought a second hand Toyota Corolla Verso in November last year from Steven Eagell in Milton Keynes. The experience of buying it was not exceptional, to be honest – salespeople are, it seems, salespeople whichever cars they’re selling. The car has been fine since then, until it developed an issue with the clutch. I took the car in to be investigated and was blown away by the quality of service. I’ve previously tended to buy Vauxhall cars and my experience with their franchised garages is that they would disbelieve that there was a fault unless it was bleeding obvious from a drive around the car park.
In this case, the service team put the car on a testing platform, yielding no obvious problems and it took the service manager to drive the car extensively to reproduce the problem. They said that they would need to remove the clutch/gearbox to be able to investigate further and my car was booked in for 10 days later. They even offered, unprompted, a courtesy car (something that never happened in my dealings with Vauxhall).
The car was with them for two days. They had replaced the entire clutch assembly – something that would have cost me £600 but which was done entirely under warranty (save £30 to replace wear and tear affected parts). The problem appears to have been heat damage caused by the previous owner’s driving habits.
The car was returned to me valeted inside and out. Throughout the entire process, the service was excellent. My more usually experience has been that claiming under warranty is, at best, a nuisance for the dealer and worst impossible.
As a Vauxhall owner, I don’t know whether this level of service is typical of Toyota dealers, whether it’s only typical of this dealer or whether it’s part of a charm offensive following the recent bad press. Frankly, I don’t care. I will be buying a number of cars over the coming years so, from a pure financial point of view, my potential long term value to Toyota is considerable. Given this good experience and how pleased I am with the car in general, guess who’s going to be my first port of call.
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