[Ravveendrra]

Originally Posted by Prakash Gupta

Congrats on your replacement.

Has Skoda asked you to sign any settlement document. If YES, please try and shed some light / info about the same.

I personally feel you should now file a case in the consumer court and claim the 2 lacks what you had to pay. In fact SAIPL should have paid you additional compensation for all the hassle you had to go thru...

And the guy whose Nano caught fire should get the Mercedes! LOL.

This settlement may not be perfect and the customer had to shell out 2 lakhs towards - insurance, road tax, registration fees and other things. If I were in his place, I would have done exactly what he had done - take the offer. It is a fair offer. I am sure the costs of litigation would have been much more than the 2L shelled out, not to mention the time and effort involved.

Cheers,

[Dose]

Originally Posted by Ravveendrra

It is a fair offer.

Would it not be a fairer offer if Skoda were to pay the taxes and insurance? After all, the customer has already paid the non-refundable, non-transferable taxes and insurance on the first car. Why is it fair to pay again for the replacement car when it is not the customer's fault that the original car is defective in a major way? I do not understand.

[Ravveendrra]

Originally Posted by Dose

Would it not be a fairer offer if Skoda were to pay the taxes and insurance? After all, the customer has already paid the non-refundable, non-transferable taxes and insurance on the first car. Why is it fair to pay again for the replacement car when it is not the customer's fault that the original car is defective in a major way? I do not understand.

I have said that it is fair but not perfect. What you suggest would be the "perfect deal". Anything beyond what you suggest would be a real vindication of consumer rights but, we in India are not there yet.

It will be nice if punitive damages against manufacturers and sellers of defective goods and purveyors of deficient services were to come here to stay. But that has a downside too, the insurance premia for cover against customer claims go up and consequently push up the costs, e.g. once doctors started getting sued for negligence, the premia doctors pay for cover against malpractice suits has gone up exorbitantly which in turn pushed up their fees & charges.

Cheers,

[Sahil]

Can we have the thread title editted?

Rohit- can you fill us in on what finally was the deal sealer in your case? I believe the sales dept helped?

[rohitioc]

Originally Posted by Ravveendrra

And the guy whose Nano caught fire should get the Mercedes! LOL.

This settlement may not be perfect and the customer had to shell out 2 lakhs towards - insurance, road tax, registration fees and other things. If I were in his place, I would have done exactly what he had done - take the offer. It is a fair offer. I am sure the costs of litigation would have been much more than the 2L shelled out, not to mention the time and effort involved.

Cheers,

Absolutely, Plus we have more priorities in life like work etc.. fighting all the time for a car is also very difficult.
On top of it paying a regular EMI and living without a car is also frustrating.
Also the Litigation and Consumer rights in India is not very strong .

[Prakash Gupta]

Originally Posted by Dose

Would it not be a fairer offer if Skoda were to pay the taxes and insurance? After all, the customer has already paid the non-refundable, non-transferable taxes and insurance on the first car. Why is it fair to pay again for the replacement car when it is not the customer's fault that the original car is defective in a major way? I do not understand.

Like Raveendra mentions, we are not looking for a Merc SLR instead of a Nano.

A "Bullock Cart" for a "Bullock Cart" is all what we are talking about.

Infact the Insurance can be transferred. I had done the same at the time of Fabia Petrol to Fabia Diesel. All that SAIPL needed to do is pay for the Registration, as it was no fault of Rohit and neither SAIPL has done a favor. I do understand that in India litigation are time & money consuming, but not as painful as the Skoda scene.

We are all Team BHPians, and let the message be loud and clear that no company, whether Skoda or any other brand, can take us for granted.

[MKRAFT]

Originally Posted by Ravveendrra

And the guy whose Nano caught fire should get the Mercedes! LOL.

This settlement may not be perfect and the customer had to shell out 2 lakhs towards - insurance, road tax, registration fees and other things. If I were in his place, I would have done exactly what he had done - take the offer. It is a fair offer. I am sure the costs of litigation would have been much more than the 2L shelled out, not to mention the time and effort involved.

Cheers,

'Wow. What sarcasm'. Wonderful support.

Is that all you have to offer to these guys oppressed by this wretched company?

I do not think this chap suggested anything as outrageous as you implied - A Mercedes for a Nano. Or, I must have missed the point. Probably you are saying that the Nano is equivalent to the Superb! LLLLLOL.

A guys buys a car worth 20 lakhs.
He survives an accident.
He is made to run around like a fool for months by the company.
After a lot of battle he gets a new car but has to pay 2 lakhs.

A fair offer, you say.

You mean it is a privilege being customer of such a company.

So, according to you we kowtow to this great company and accept whatever they dish out. LLLLLLLLLOL.

Skoda will be proud of you.

[Ravveendrra]

Originally Posted by MKRAFT

'Wow. What sarcasm'. Wonderful support.

Is that all you have to offer to these guys oppressed by this wretched company?

I do not think this chap suggested anything as outrageous as you implied - A Mercedes for a Nano. Or, I must have missed the point. Probably you are saying that the Nano is equivalent to the Superb! LLLLLOL.

A guys buys a car worth 20 lakhs.
He survives an accident.
He is made to run around like a fool for months by the company.
After a lot of battle he gets a new car but has to pay 2 lakhs.
A fair offer, you say.

You mean it is a privilege being customer of such a company.

So, according to you we kowtow to this great company and accept whatever they dish out. LLLLLLLLLOL.

Skoda will be proud of you.

I wonder what you mean by "support". If by support, you mean that I should advise the OP to engage a lawyer and litigate spending time, effort and money and generally waste his life when I am aware that the resultant gain will be negligible compared to the money, effort and time expended by him, I would be doing him a dis-service and I could not bring myself to extend such "support" which would be detrimental to his interests.

I thought I had stated the position very clearly in my later post:

Originally Posted by Ravveendrra

I have said that it is fair but not perfect. What you suggest would be the "perfect deal". Anything beyond what you suggest would be a real vindication of consumer rights but, we in India are not there yet.

It will be nice if punitive damages against manufacturers and sellers of defective goods and purveyors of deficient services were to come here to stay. But that has a downside too, the insurance premia for cover against customer claims go up and consequently push up the costs, e.g. once doctors started getting sued for negligence, the premia doctors pay for cover against malpractice suits has gone up exorbitantly which in turn pushed up their fees & charges.

Cheers,

As you will see, I have mentioned that there is something beyond a 'fair deal'. I have mentioned that there is a perfect deal and have also briefly pointed out the benefits and demerits of 'punitive damages' in which case the manufacturer would have been made to cough up several times the cost of the car - in this case say 10 times making a pay out of INR 22000000/-. However, I do not think Indian courts or consumer fora are ready to award such damages. So what is the point of Rohit working up a lather, running around the courts and wearing himself down? As Rohit mentions, there are more important things in life.

I too am all for consumer rights. It is fine to have ideals and fight for them but it is sometimes better to take a pragmatic view, do a cost benefit analysis and decide on the most profitable (least loss) way forward. It would have been irresponsible on my part to advise Rohit to fight for my ideals.

Cheers,

[diffsoft]

Ravveendrra:

If for every error, mistake, misdemeanour, crime the victim opts for settlement because it involves running around and the cost is not worth it, what's to stop the perpetrator from continuing to find new victims?

One of the possible reasons complaints against Skoda continue to grow is that possibly out of the many wrongful acts committed by them / dealer only one or two speak-up and they too opt for settlement. When will it stop? Possibly when customers stop buying Skoda? Like, I was told happened to Audi in the 80s in the US? http://autosafety.org/srr/SAAUDI.pdf

That's bad for existing customers as well.

Cheers,

[GTO]

Step in the right direction, Skoda! Rohit, I'm extremely happy that your car is being replaced. Sure, the 2 lakh rupee differential is out of your pocket, but its still a positive development. Many other manufacturers have refused a replacement even if the customer is willing to bear 10% of the original cost, and when the problems were more major.

Thread title edited.

[silentscreamers]

Iam planning to write a song for existing Skoda customers based on the song 'Thoda hai thode ki zaroorat hai', its called - "Skoda hai Ghode ki zaroorat hai" :P
A little off topic but i guess it goes along with the sentiments over here..

[jigbarai]

Originally Posted by diffsoft

Ravveendrra:

If for every error, mistake, misdemeanour, crime the victim opts for settlement because it involves running around and the cost is not worth it, what's to stop the perpetrator from continuing to find new victims?

One of the possible reasons complaints against Skoda continue to grow is that possibly out of the many wrongful acts committed by them / dealer only one or two speak-up and they too opt for settlement. When will it stop? Possibly when customers stop buying Skoda? Like, I was told happened to Audi in the 80s in the US? http://autosafety.org/srr/SAAUDI.pdf

That's bad for existing customers as well.

Cheers,

Ok, why do you think Rohit (your so called 'victim') accepted the 'fair deal' offered by Skoda (your so called 'perpetrator') ? It made good sense to him, right ?
No one can be a better judge of the situation than him, atleast in this case.
So, if HE feels he is doing the right thing in whatever he is doing, why are we hell bent on asking him to go thru the legal trauma (when he himself choses to be a satisfied customer' ?

Or do you imply here that Skoda deliberately put a faulty DSG in a new car that was delivered to him ? I hope so not.
They are machines buddy, and at times things can go wrong. Point is how we accept, resolve and rectify it, period.

Have we never committed any mistakes in our job/service/business so far ? What do we do when we find that something was 'not perfect' in our own doing ?

Skoda here has done a commendable job in replacing a 22 L car for the 'problems discussed in this thread' so far.
Like GTO mentioned, there are many manufacturers in this very country who wouldnt even think about doing this. They would simply put - at best 'rectify the faulty part' in their so called 'warranty'. Care to share a few examples, if you know otherwise. Please.

Food for thought ..

[Berj79]

Originally Posted by GTO

Step in the right direction, Skoda! Rohit, I'm extremely happy that your car is being replaced. Sure, the 2 lakh rupee differential is out of your pocket, but its still a positive development. Many other manufacturers have refused a replacement even if the customer is willing to bear 10% of the original cost, and when the problems were more major.

Thread title edited.

i agree with you there, not all car manufacturers would have done the same, for example look at honda, the civic has a major suspension flaw not suited for india, i doubt they did any testing before the car launch here & when the issues were brought up they didnt do anything about it, i still see civics crawling over speedbreakers & other cars taking the breakers so easily, the new civic has solved the problem but why didnt honda do this from the start?? they were so mmm about it, not trying to create a war here just trying to say this is india & if a car manufacturer replaces a car under warranty its a very nice gesture i feel, no one would do that in this country for sure, thats my 2 cents,

cheers..

[sudev]

Good to know Skoda is taking customer care bit more actively.

However what went behind the scenes is not made clear by rohitioc. He had to use his "contacts" to twist the arms as mentioned in earlier post? Or was this genuinely out of customer "concern" move by Skoda?

[diffsoft]

@jigbarai:

My jottings were more more principle based, and hence victim means not just Rohit but everyone else and perpetrator is not just Skoda but any perpetrator.

If we use individual settlements then what's the use of the law? And how do I know it will be fair for the victim?

For instance why did Rohit have to shell out 2 lakhs and why Gagan only 1.47 lakhs? Are there other Superb customers who have the DSG problem who are not aware that their cars can be replaced if they put their foot down. We do not know what means Rohit and Gagan used to get Skoda to replace their car. What if those means are not available to you? In fact I did not get a satisfactory answer as to how Gagan got Skoda to replace his car when they initially refused to do so.

Also note that once you have spent large sums of money only to find a potential lemon you automatically begin to think, "hey let me spend a couple of lakhs to save my 20+ lakhs". Thus you are forced to settle when your position is weak.

Machines can go wrong but one is buying under the assumption that there is a 95% or more chance that it is right. I am not saying Skoda is intentionally putting in faulty DSG, but if there are so many faulty ones (2 known cases out of the 10 odd owners on Team BHP tells me that it is highly likely that there are more than 100 or so among the 1000 on the roads today) then the above assumption is put to test. Skoda can always replace the faulty ones but what's to say the new ones are not faulty

In my case, where I was the victim about 2 years ago, and Skoda and the dealer were the perpetrators, I ignored A*S*S issues warned by many BHPians and bought Skoda in good faith only to find that they knowingly passed a 15 month old & damaged car as new. And when I informed them about it, I found my registration was forged - what else could be the intent but to force the lemon on me. Skoda knew it. Or atleast the Sales Manager of Skoda did. I had a very tough time settling the issue - running from pillar to post, with no response from Skoda - unfortunately I also did not have any fancy contacts that some people say helped them. I was lucky that local police got wind of it and threatened the dealer. Skoda which was silent till then, ignoring even my legal notices squirmed and said it was sorry this happened to me. I am willing to bet that if I had not known Team BHP and taken the tough stand advised by many here, I would have been thoroughly fooled. So is the practice settle only when the victim finds out he's one and takes action?

Let me sum up as to why the "settlement practice" is not in the customer's best interest and in the long run the car maker's.

Let us say that I make 100 cars of which 10 are faulty, out of which only 1 complain and I replace the car. I do not know about the remaining 9. I continue to think my cars are hot cakes and it is profitable for me to just replace one. The remaining 9 suffer. So it's not in the customer's best interest.

This goes on when slowly over a period of time as customers gain awareness and my car sales drop relative to market. I do not know why my sales are dropping because I continue to think they are hot cakes. In case of Skoda I can see that in Fabia, where VW themselves admitted ( Volkswagen aims to sell one lakh cars by 2014 - dnaindia.com) they are not doing well - whereas the premium hatchback segment is growing at a scorching pace, a segment created by Skoda. Thus it is bad for the manufacturer as well.

Cheers,