Nissan blamed my driving for faulty car
I PURCHASED a new Nissan Micra from Chorley Nissan Group, Blackpool, on March 31 last year.
It had a three-year, 60,000-mile warranty. I was driving on January 9 this year when I began to have problems with the clutch.
I phoned the garage, who told me to contact the RAC to bring in the car. The RAC technician said the clutch was faulty.
Nissan says the clutch has burned out after just 1,290 miles and my driving is to blame. It will not cover the repair, which would cost me £820, on its warranty.
I have been driving for more than 50 years, often doing more than 30,000 miles a year without clutch trouble.
I have tried contacting Nissan’s head office but, after speaking with the supplier, it still maintains it is my fault and is not covered by the warranty.
A.L., Poulton-le-fylde, Lancs. I HAVE heard many tales of garages trying to pull the wool over their customers’ eyes, but this really takes the biscuit.
As you say, you’re an extremely experienced driver. The idea that CAN I take interest from a twoyear fixed rate bond during the term or is it tied up until the bond matures?
D. M., by email MOST banks and building societies will pay the interest each year into an account of your choosing. You just let them know at the start where you want the payments to go. You can find details in the terms and conditions of the bond. COULD you advise me about a goodwill payment from Halifax? I took out a mortgage with them 25 years ago and you would be, in their words, ‘riding the clutch’, and therefore damaging it, is utter nonsense.
Once I took the issue up with Nissan’s head office, they quickly saw sense. In what can only be described as the briefest of statements it said: ‘Upon further investigation we discovered there was a fault with this clutch and subsequently the vehicle will be repaired under warranty.’
Of course there was a fault — and the garage should have admitted as much from the start.
Sadly there was no mention of an apology to you, either for the difficulties they had caused or for failing to investigate your problem properly in the first place.
So, while your car will now be fixed, I’m afraid Nissan scores zero out of ten in my book for customer service. paid it off in 2010. I am not sure why they should now offer this payment.
B. C., Manchester. HALIFAX has paid you this sum because of a blunder in 2009. It failed to notify some mortgage customers after it raised the cap on its standard variable rate.
The goodwill payment is based on the difference in repayments as a result of the rate change. LAST summer you kindly helped in my dispute with Nat west. I’d spent weeks trying to get a new debit card after being told of fraudulent transactions.
As a result of your intervention, Nat west wrote on September 22 saying I would be credited with £125 compensation and a further £100 ‘in recognition of the distress and inconvenience suffered’.
I wrote immediately to thank them for their kind gesture.
To date, I have still not received any money. I telephoned their 0845 customer services line on January 19 to be told the matter was resolved on September 28 last year.
I was then told they would check up and call me back. The call never came.
E.W., Essex. NATWEST’S spokesman was humbly apologetic after investigating your case — as he should be.
When an organisation tells me it will be paying compensation, I expect the money to be paid promptly. So what went wrong?
The person who had dealt with it initially had sorted everything and I GIVE my nanny spending money so she can entertain the children. I’m considering using a prepaid card instead: which is the cheapest?
R. F., Bucks. PREPAID cards are a good alternative to debit and credit cards abroad — but not such good value at home. Many have a s et- up fee and charge f or purchases and withdrawing cash.
The Cashplus Gold Active Plus card, from Moneysupermarket, is free for purchases and costs 99p for each cash withdrawal. It has a £4.95 set-up fee. passed it to the appropriate person simply to push the button to trigger payment. But they did not do this.
Even if that can be put down to incompetence, there is no excuse for the fact that Nat west then failed to deal with your complaint properly.
If a complaint about unpaid compensation can be shoved to one side, it is evidence of something fundamentally wrong with how Nat west trains its staff to deal with customer complaints.
The result is a double-helping of egg on the face for the taxpayer- owned bank.
Finally, your money has been paid. And they have sent you a bouquet of flowers as a further apology. MY £50,000 fixed-rate bond with Santander matured on December 1. In November the bank wrote to me asking me to telephone or call into the branch to discuss my options.
I am recovering from major surgery and could not get to my local branch, so I wrote twice — on November 14 and 28 — to say I wanted to cash in the bond and asked for a cheque to be sent to me.
I got no reply from Santander and it rolled my money over into another oneyear fixed-rate bond.
D.B, Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. SANTANDER failed to act on your instructions, so the bond automatically rolled over. It has since closed the bond and sent you a cheque, plus the missing interest and a further £75 along with an apology.
It also says it is giving its staff further training to ensure this sort of thing does not happen in the future.