Dec 13, 2016 03:05 PM
3402 Views
I have been a bike enthusiast since my school days and have been a proud owner of Pulsar which just is about to complete it's 14 years journey and is still going strong.
I have enjoyed riding my pulsar though my school days, fun rides during college and even used it commute to my office. Even now sometimes I would rest my car and would use my pulsar for going around the city. My pulsar has clocked around 76, 000 kms as of now.
Recently I decided to go for a upgrade and made a choice to own ThunderBird 350. I was looking at price range between 1.5 Lakh to 2 Lakh and ThunderBird 350 seemed so perfect to me.
After 3 months of usage I can say that the bike ride is comfortable particularly when you are running on highways with minimal traffic. It serves its purpose well when you are not in hurry on roads.
No issues with the ride quality.
But if one talks about the build quality and customer service, the royal enfield fails badly.
I haven't seen disoriented bunch of fellow as I have seen at RE service center. I am here in particular taking about Rawal Automobiles, Ghaziabad.
I have faced issue right from the day I have purchased my TB 350.
1) Day 1 when I brought my brand new ThunderBird 350 home from Rawal Automobiles in Ghaziabad, I realized that petrol is leaking from point where you can shut the petrol flow on/off right under the petrol tank. I had to take it to service center the very next day.
This talks a lot about how diligent people are at RE or its service center. How can a bike with an issue as such was even rolled out from the manufacturing unit and then again how come the issue was not caught during PDE at Rawal Automobiles.
Though this issue was fixed but the behavior of staff and manager's was really unexpected when I questioned the quality of PDE done at their end. They had no remorse what so ever and were shamelessly defending themselves. At one point during the argument I was fumed to the extent that I even refused to take the repaired bike back home and persisted on getting a replacement.
It was bad turn of events that I had to take my bike to service center the very next day of purchase.
2) After 2 months: One day while coming back from work on my ThunderBird I felt at many instances that the bike is shaking. I stopped multiple times on the way back home just to check if there was a puncture in any of types but that was never the case. It kept happening next day as well and I was clueless about the reason. Even air pressure was perfect.
I then took my bike to nearby mechanic to get it checked and the mechanic was able to identify the issue right away.
7 wheel spokes of the rear tyre were broken while several other were loose.
I was quiet surprised as I could never imagine that a 2 month old bike which has only completed 1100 kms will encounter such problem.
I don't know if it is poor quality of spokes or again poor PDE done where spokes were not screwed perfectly that would result in such issue.
I wonder what if I would have ignored this issue for few more days and continued riding the bike, surely an accident was waiting for me.
But the trouble is not yet over for me as I am unable to find the replacement of spokes anywhere in Ghaziabad, their service center Rawal Automobiles doesn't have it, local shops doesn't either.
Rawal Automobiles again in this case was totally unprofessional. I understand that at times the things might be out of stock but when you an authorized service center then it your duty to help customer procure items that belong to your brand. Simply turning customer by saying that they don't have the said item and they don't know when the item would be available again is really a poor show to say the least.
It's been 15 days my TB is standing still. Guess I will have to take a day off and search around in Delhi for the spokes.
I know this would be fixed too but all this has really left a poor taste for me.
Royal Enfield bikes for sure have a poor build quality and surely they are not reliable as I thought they are.
Pathetic customer service makes things really worse.
