Never buy a Fiat product. Review on Palio - Petrol

I own a Fiat Palio GTx. This car has run about 24,000 Kms till date. I met with an accident a few months back and got the car repaired from an authorised service station. After all the necessary repairs were carried out, by sheer chance it was discovered that there is a noise coming from the engine. I say sheer chance, because there were no indications at all in terms of performance and the noise was not easily audible.

Fiat India engineers (not the dealership engineers, but engineers working for Fiat India) inspected the vehicle and came to the conclusion that this was because of the accident. I spoke to various automobile engineers working in big car manufacturing companies in India, and all of them were unanimous in their opinion that there was no way this problem could have occurred due to the accident.

I met a Fiat engineer, Mr Satish Vij, and asked him to explain to me technically how, in his opinion, this problem occurred because of the accident. He could not offer even one techinically strong point to justify his claim. His best justification was to compare my car to a blood pressure patient. In his opinion, due to high blood pressure in some patients the heart is the first organ to be damaged and in some cases the kidneys are the first to be damaged.

In my car?s case it was the engine. He came up with even more ridiculous theories which are mind boggling. Having lost complete faith in him I wrote to a senior executive in the national after sales division of Fiat India. On not receiving any reply from him after a few days I sent him atleast 2 to 3 more mails. Finally after not getting any response I called him up. Apparently he had received the mails but chose not to respond. After this call I finally got a mail from some other person in Fiat.

The crux of his mail was that Fiat India does not accept that the engine of their premier product in India had failed. Again none of my technical queries were answered.

A few weeks ago I met another engineer from Fiat India, Mr Pathak. Although his opinion about the cause of the engine failure remained the same as his colleague, he atleast tried to explain in technical jargon his reason for coming to this opinion, however I still did not see eye to eye with him on this. I asked him to give his inspection report and conclusions to me in writing. He agreed and told me that it would be faxed to me.

However when I did not get his report, I called him up. His response was shocking to say the least. He said to me that he did not have the time to write a thesis and give it to me! When I said to him that I am not asking him for anything else other than the explanation he provided me, he replied that nobody would be foolish enough to give it in writing and it would be as good as cutting off one?s hands!

This my friend is the kind of service a Fiat India customer gets. I personally know of cases where other car companies have gone out of their way to help a customer. Recently a Tata Safari owner had a problem in his engine, it had hardly run a few thousand kms. Normally a small problem like this would have been repaired at the company?s cost. But Telco went a step further and gave that customer a brand new Safari in lieu of his old Safari! Now this is a truly commendable gesture from Telco. I have heard equally wonderful stories from GM and Ford customers.

A few people who work in the automobile industry, to whom I spoke, told me that Fiat India?s financial condition is pretty precarious and this might be the reason why they are unwilling to bear responsibility. There are rumors that Fiat India could go bankrupt soon, after all for how long can Fiat Italy, which itself is in huge financial trouble, repeatedly write off the losses incurred by Fiat India.

Till date I have not recieved any technically sound explanation from Fiat India, I have lots of technically strong people who can prove, without a shadow of a doubt, that this is a failure of the most advanced Fiat engine in India.