Consumer news
CASE STUDY Owner has had enough as garage is stumped by Range Rover’s electrical faults
Watchdog solves your problems, plus you have your say
THE fonder you are of a car, the more likely you are to forgive it the odd niggle. But what happens when a vehicle you love develops so many faults your patience wears thin, and you don’t want to take it back into the garage again?
That’s the experience Lee Ryan from Epping, Essex, had after his 2016 Range Rover Sport developed several separate faults, requiring multiple visits to his Land Rover dealer – one lasting two months.
Lee’s Range Rover had issues with its parking cameras, and showed error messages relating to its stability control, hill descent control and All Terrain Progress control systems. While these were rectified under warranty, and Lee said Grange Land Rover of Woodford had been helpful, one intermittent fault – which had been present since he took delivery in November 2016 – remained.
When the outside temperature was below four degrees Celsius and the Range Rover’s Terrain Response system was in Auto mode, Lee told us the car would sometimes pull away slowly, as if it were taking off in second gear. “It sometimes feels like it is in snow and ice mode,” he said. “It is sluggish, and not right.” Lee added that even if the system were automatically changing mode to reflect potentially slippery conditions, it didn’t tell him it was doing so, sometimes leaving him surprised by a lack of power when pulling away at junctions.
Also, putting the Terrain Response into Dynamic or General mode and then switching it back to Auto fixed the issue.
Lee said he understood the complex and intermittent nature of this fault made it tricky to replicate, but told us he didn’t want to take the car back to the dealer. “When you constantly have a car in the service centre, it does affect your enjoyment of it,” he said.
Frustrated at the lack of progress, and having been in touch with Land Rover’s customer team, Lee contacted us for help.
We spoke to Land Rover on his behalf. A representative said: “We sympathise with Mr Ryan’s position, and always aim to provide the best customer service possible. We would welcome Mr Ryan into the retailer for us to assess the vehicle to find an amicable resolution.”
Lee told us: “I appreciate the offer, and am willing to listen to what they have to say. But if it involves the car going back into the workshop, I’ll be taking the matter further. They’ve had plenty of opportunity to fix it.”