Ian_S said:
Yes they've ****ed up with the transverse Ingenium EU6 diesels, but if they admit that they'll probably be sunk by litigation. I suspect the loss of a service plan provider will be linked to that as well. A simple, and probably effective sticking plaster for that mess would be to follow Jaguar's lead on servicing and for affected models over 3 years old, offer cheap fixed price oil changes that cover the costs only, and with a very cheap labour rate, for example. £125 all in. Personally I'd be happy with that, especially if it was a 30 minute while you wait job.
Hear, hear. But the ill-fated mating of the Ingenium engine with the too-small D8 chassis of the Evoque, Discover Sport and, later, the E-Pace necessitated a sequence of deliberate deceptions to hide the serious problems they were having getting the combination to work, even poorly. Disco Sport sales were stalling in 2015, in part because people were waiting for Ingenium, and amongst the folks in the queue there were impatient fleet buyers who were eager to get their hands on a great looking car that promised to reduce their servicing overheads by up to 50%. This car
had to be delivered with the extra-long service interval because that's what the world had been promised. It said it on the internet. The magazines had promised it in the teasers. The brochures had been printed with the claims of lower cost of ownership and more convenience. But, meanwhile, in the back room, powertrain engineers were telling their managers that the DOC and SCRF combination would cause serious oil dilution and that they needed to scale back the 2 year/21,000 mile target. Instead of taking the honest and obvious step of toning down the mileage claims, the bosses pressed on and the engineers were told to keep banging their heads against a wall. We all know what happened next.
Speaking as one of the victims of the misselling that occurred (and which is still going on to this day), I believe that this company deliberately misled hundreds of thousands of potential diesel owners about the true cost of ownership that they would experience with a DS. Over the lifetime of the car, say 10 years, what we were "sold" was servicing costs fixed at £499 (later £625) for the first 5 years plus a maximum of three further 2 year/21,000 mile services at about £500 each. That is an equivalent amount per annum for servicing of £200, give or take. What do we have in reality? For the guy with a typical 7,000 mile service interval doing 12,000 miles a year, it will now cost a minimum of £4,750 over the same period (oil, oil, A, oil, oil, B, etc.) or £475 per annum, an increase of 138%.
On top of this there's the additional wear and tear on the SCRF, potential clogging and prematue failure of the EGR components plus a documented risk of complete engine failure due to high dilution. And, as BFGDSman points out, there's the downwards pressue on residual values once the second hand market gets to grips with the problems and costs associated with owning one of these things outside of its warranty period.
We all know why JLR did this. They desperately needed the cash flow from 200,000+ annual DS and Evoque sales - one third of the annual sales volume - and anything that threatened that revenue stream was mercilessly dealt with and the threat removed. By whatever means was necessary. Even if it meant setting up a systematic mis-selling scheme for the dealers to engage in. Mis-selling of the service deal will probably prove to be the thing that catches them out legally over this as the penny finally drops in the wider community and someone with sufficient anger realises that they were well and truly had. I saw a typical case on facebook yesterday....
"Stuart" bought a DS in 2016 and paid £499 for what he thought was a five year service plan. His car didn't have N010/N020 so he got to 2 years in blissful ignorance about diesel dilution. He had the A service in January 2018 at nearly 15,000 miles. They applied the fix to the dilution counter and so turned on the service required message. He managed another 7,000 miles before the newly-awakened dilution counter told him that a service was needed. So, at 22,000 miles on a 3 year old car, they completed the 42,000 mile B service and Stuart is now out of credits. He is just one of thousands waking up to a problem that was first discussed and accurately predicted on the forum six months ago...
https://www.discosportforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5379&p=91818&hilit=N010+N020+Q627#p91818
https://www.discosportforums.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=5379&p=93915#p93915
Look at those dates and mileages. It's like someone had a crystal ball!