Aston Martin DBX
Customer service wins the day after our Aston develops a fault
IT’S A WARNING LIGHT, JUST TURN THE car off and on again and it will go out. Or not. Perhaps if you leave it overnight it will be extinguished by the morning. No? Turn the passenger airbag off and on, see if that does the trick? Nope. Nothing. After four days of man logic, I gave in and called Aston Martin Assistance to ask if they had any suggestions as to how to turn off/ignore the DBX’S warning message that the driver’s airbag had a malfunction and I should consult the workshop. I’d even tried Matt Becker, AM’S head of vehicle engineering, but he was out of office tending to his garden…
Thankfully Aston Martin’s assistance programme was as efficient as you would expect from a car company that charges as much as it does for its cars. During the first call, midafternoon on a Thursday, the key facts were taken and I was asked if I’d like the car to go to a dealer closest to the office or my home (about 80 miles apart). I selected the latter and was told they’d call me back within 30 minutes.
Half an hour later JYD had been booked in with the dealer and its collection from the evo office was arranged. Ten minutes later the local recovery firm called to say they were on their way but what time would I like them to arrive, which felt very customer-first and therefore totally unexpected. From making that first call to the DBX leaving on a low loader took less than two hours. Given my previous experiences with recovery firms (the RAC taking ten hours to recover a 911 with a puncture and leaving me 100 miles from home after dropping us both at a closed dealership) and taking into account I wasn’t at the side of the road and therefore not in any danger, I think that’s pretty good.
The fault had been diagnosed by 9am the next day – the connection between the steering wheel’s airbag and the control unit had failed, an issue that had recently been added to a service bulletin – but as it was now Friday and the parts wouldn’t arrive until Saturday, the fitment would have to wait until Monday. By 10.30am on Monday the DBX was ready and repatriation was already in progress, the car returned under covered transport at the requested 2pm the following day.
A black mark for the failed bit, but a big tick for how it was dealt with. Customer service is often a week point for car firms, with third-party agencies taking on the role – Aston Martin enlists Allianz to manage its assistance service – but rarely sharing the same principles and objectives as their client. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case in this instance.
Date acquired April 2021 Total mileage 7723 Mileage this month 1376 Cost this month £0 mpg this month 17.9