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Originally Posted by vinaydas Good review, any plans on upgrading the headlamps?
Keep us updated on the same  |
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Originally Posted by getsurya I am also looking for options for Fog and High beam upgrades. Bibin has opted for Osram night breakers for High beam, I guess.
Would be great to know your plan/thought. |
On the headlamps, I'm not very happy with the xenon projectors but I guess there's no choice but to live with them forever. The high beam has been fairly okay for my needs, although I do feel a pair of aux lamps would make highway driving (especially in the rains) a lot easier. But most aux lamps are blinding for oncoming traffic and hence I would end up using them in very limited conditions.
The Osrams should be a good option to upgrade, I've used them in the Safari and they're definitely worth the money. Contrary to the popular opinions that they don't last enough, I just had one bulb replacement on the Safari in 3 years which is pretty good for a high luminosity bulb. And I did a lot of night driving so they were definitely used quite a bit.
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Originally Posted by behaln great comparison , would appreciate if you could also elaborate on service costs as well as the spare parts costs involved , as they would definitely be helpful in the long term maintenance of the car. |
I just finished the second free service with 6000kms on the odo and it costed me 7K since I opted for an out of schedule engine oil and filter change. However, there's a darker side to my whole service experience with Nandi Toyota at Hosur road. I was assuming it's going to be all hunky dory with the Fortuner service experiences, but in India you can expect to be cheated even by the most trustworthy brands.
My wife had booked the appointment for service at the hosur road branch since she could drop it on her way to work and pick up on the way back. I had asked her to call me when the SA was assigned for the job so I could tell him what all needs to be done. When I spoke to the SA, I told him that I wanted the engine oil and filter to be replaced now and I'll do that again in the 10k service. He agreed that it was a good idea to do an oil change earlier than 10k for a new car and gave me a cost estimate of 54xx rupees + Tax. I asked him to go ahead with it since this seemed normal as compared to the costs I've been paying for the Safari. The service was done and the car was delivered on time with a bill of 7K which included cost of oil, filter and labor for about 6k and rest of it was tax.
Today, I casually was looking at the invoice and discovered that the oil replaced was Synthetic and not the stock spec'd mineral oil. I called the SA and asked him about this and he was trying to hide behind the fact that he told me the cost estimate for the oil change, but he didn't tell me that it was going to be synthetic. When asked about the difference in cost, he sheepishly tells me that the mineral oil costs 2500 lesser than the synthetic. At this point, I get totally disappointed with the dishonest service and ask him to get his manager. He tries to evade the topic and wasn't ready to give me the service managers number. It seemed like he wanted me to let it go without raising any noise about it.
I made a couple of follow up calls to the service center, once speaking to the team leader and the other one to the customer care manager and both heard me out and promised to call me back in 15 mins. But their 15 minutes never materialized even after an hour long wait. I will pursue this tomorrow with some renewed rigor and see what can be done to make sure they get a lesson out of this episode.
Coming from Tata and Mahindra where they employ honest fools (I say this in a good way), Toyota just seems like a fraud enterprise when it comes to their service staff. I've had issues with the quality of work being done at Tata or Mahindra, but I've never been cheated for money even once. It's not about the money here, its about the trust!
All my hopes of having a trouble free relationship with Toyota have gone down the drains, unless they really do something to change my opinion about their Toyota Trust values.