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On our difficult road to marketing the nitiFilter®, we have come up against a serious obstacle – the famous manufacturer’s warranty. We obviously knew when we embarked on such a project that this would be one of the difficulties we’d have to overcome, but what’s truly fascinating is that this obstacle arises even when it’s not there, so primitive is this reflex on the part of most players. Like Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, not even there, the pretext is still used…
A warranty subject to conditions
Let’s face it, the manufacturer’s warranty only applies under conditions that are in fact difficult to meet, both for the average person and for the most rigorous fleet manager. In addition to duration or mileage conditions, which already automatically exclude the majority of any fleet, specific conditions can be subtly complex to guarantee… if only because they depend directly on a vehicle’s service history, which can vary according to model, options, year and place of manufacture. In fact, this is one of the difficulties faced by independent service networks (Norauto, Feu Vert, Speedy, Midas & co.) when it comes to ensuring warranty continuity when your car is serviced by them: have they complied with the maintenance booklet for your vehicle (and not for this type of model)?
if you’re a fleet manager, are you sure that all oil top-ups have been made with the right oil? If you manage maintenance in-house, do you have the capacity to stock all the oils recommended by each of the different manufacturers, or do you have one or two tanks with the right oils (e.g. a 5W30 and a 15W40)… but not the manufacturer’s oils?
In the end, in the vast majority of cases, the people we talk to are totally outside the strict conditions for applying the manufacturer’s warranty, if they were acting in good faith, but …
The paradox of a warranty that doesn’t guarantee much
If you’ve ever tried to have a breakdown covered by the manufacturer’s warranty, you’ll know that it’s far from easy, and that the manufacturer will be overzealous, using clever tricks to avoid responsibility. Obviously, I’m not talking about manufacturer recalls, but rather the handling of these breakdowns:
- of which you’ll find many similar cases all over the place ( cuckoo Puretech 1.2 and Renault TCE engines but see e.g. Versailles Court of Appeal CH. 03 December 19, 2013 N° 12/04826 )
- or just happen to show up not too long after the end of the maintenance package you were sold when you bought your vehicle.
- which you were convinced would be taken automatically, but you did not know that during a maintenance, the oil was not Total but Esso or the reverse or any other pretext ( CA Montpellier CH. 02 March 19, 2013 N° 11/08576 )
…Between what you imagine and reality, the gap can be immense and the realization painful…
The warranty that blocks instead of preserves
Imagine, then, that you provide a solution like nitiFilter®, which protects engines. In practice, you have to deal with this primitive, even virtual scarecrow (because it’s only in your head, and once again, in practice, the conditions are often not respected), which gives the illusion of protection but whose effectiveness is ultimately weak, and which is nevertheless given magical power … magical or rather evil because it bewitches those who believe in it to the point that, even with multiple examples of this In the absence of protection, we always come across people who don’t think for a moment that they can “get over it”:
- several months of conflict with the manufacturer on several vehicles… no problem, the warranty is always key and mandatory…
- fabulating that installing an element on the engine filtration could void the warranty on the gearbox, bearings ( insert your most improbable trick here )…
So, paradoxically, you reject a solution that really protects you for a pipe dream.
Warranty: destruction rather than protection
So, under the pretext – admittedly imposed on them – of consumer protection, manufacturers use and abuse their power to preserve their preserve, and force their customers to make Cornelian choices: do nothing or lose the “warranty”.
You want to save a few k€ and a few dozen tonnes of CO2 on your truck fleet, savings that would enable you to invest more quickly in cleaner solutions… but you’re not thinking about that, my good man, what about the warranty?
What’s even more astonishing is that even for a product that’s normally less new, a flexFuel box that has been approved(1) by the relevant government departments (
Centre National de Réception des Véhicules ), if you have a company car and you want to significantly reduce your TVS (which can add up to more than €1,000 / year), well, you’ll be stuck with your maintenance / leasing contract!
It’s not as if we’re in a #critical period for the #planet, where every effort should be made to lower our impact and find #economies
(1) : Bearing in mind that the very concept of homologation is itself debatable, since it severely limits the number of models available – here again, it seems that warranty prevails over pragmatism.
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