Sep 13, 2016 10:12 PM
14584 Views
The technicality that they play with here is that they enforce . So by doing this they basically assume that you will be driving 10k kms in any span of 6 months and hence your car warrants a oil change every 10k kms, which is not wrong. But a very few people cover those kind of distances and the vast majority have not run even half of those 10k kms in 6 months. But the service centres make use of this loophole and insists on following the manual which very cleverly adds the words "whichever is earlier"at the end of this kms vs time duration debate. Hence a customer finds himself paying for oil and filter changes every 6 months even though his running doesn't call for the same.
And these are just basic service components. More agonizing is when you have crossed 3-4 years and your car has run around 30-40k kms( assuming a 10k km annual running). But because they follow the 6 month interval according to them at the end of 4 years your car has technically covered 80k kms( 8 "6 months" intervals x 10k kms for each). And they want to start conducting major services in your car with change of timing belts and everything. This is what I faced at Nissan and it left a very sour taste. The only saving grace for the customer, if you can call it that, is that by that time you are out of the warranty period and hence can refuse to this blatant extortion and stick to getting only the basic things needed. Ofcourse this calls for a good understanding of your cars servicing needs and the service manual. And any customer who trusts the after sales blindly would end up paying through the roof to get stuff done which was unwarranted to start with.