Warranties need a revamp
Thursday 19th February 2009, 7:00AM GMT.
LETTER: It has been interesting to see how the motor industry has moved forward in offering warranties of three years/60 thousand miles and more. Even an Olympus digital SLR camera I purchased recently comes with a two-year warranty.
Meanwhile, with some exceptions, the home appliance manufacturers continue to lag way behind with a typical one year parts and labour warranty.
Arguably reliability has significantly improved but, with the technological shift, when things go wrong they can be very expensive to repair. I find it frustrating to invest £1,500 in a LCD TV with a one year warranty and be expected to pay at least 10 per cent more to extend it to three years.
If manufacturers have confidence in their products why not provide a three-year warranty? I guess the question is that the life depends on the amount of use in this period – just like car mileage.
One way around this would be to chip each electrical device so the number of hours of use would be stored and could be accessed easily by the manufacturers.
This way we could be buying a TV with an 8,000 hours warranty for example or a washing machine (yes some have five-year parts warranties but labour costs can be high) with a 5,000-wash warranty. This could give a marketing edge and surely benefit the consumer?
Paul Thomas
Priorslee
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