You wouldn’t think you’d have to check the start date of the warranty or maintenance plan on the brand new car you’re buying but, as it turns out, it is highly advisable.
Of course, the start date should be the date you take ownership of the new vehicle. But that’s not what happened when Ronnie Moodley bought a new Mercedes C250D from an NMI dealership in Shelly Beach on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast in February 2018. The purchase price included a six-year maintenance plan, which should only have expired next February. But in June this year, when he made enquiries about the cost of extending the plan for another two years, to 2026, he discovered that it was due to expire last month.
“For some reason, the car was registered by the dealership in October 2017,” he said, pointing out that it was not a “demo” car. He raised his concerns with the assistant finance and insurance consultant at NMI’s Pietermaritzburg dealership in late June, expecting the error would to be swiftly rectified.
“But despite assurances that the matter had been escalated to various levels within the dealership and even to Mercedes-Benz South Africa, no progress has been reported to me,” Moodley told me in an e-mail last month. “I was assured that the dealer principal would call me but he never did.”
When he stopped getting replies to his e-mails, Moodley approached me. “This discrepancy has major inconvenience and financial implications for me, and I kindly request your urgent assistance in raising awareness about this issue and investigating it further,” he wrote.
He was worried that should the maintenance plan expire in October, in keeping with the incorrect start date, “the dealership may claim that they can no longer help me in rectifying the matter, denying me an opportunity to extend the maintenance plan”.
I initially raised the case with Mercedes-Benz South Africa (MBSA), and got an undertaking that the matter would be “thoroughly investigated”. A week later, the “buck” was passed to Feisal Essack, the NMI Group’s franchise executive. “This matter was unfortunately not escalated to me,” he said.
Most people in a company are only allowed to say no to a customer. Very few are empowered to say yes
I hear this so often. Customers don’t have access to decisionmakers in the companies they’ve chosen to do business with, and get stuck with those who have no power to give them the “fix” they’re entitled to.
As a motor industry exec told me a few years back: “Most people in a company are only allowed to say no to a customer. Very few are empowered to say yes.” Once Essack got wind of Moodley’s predicament — it having been communicated by Moodley to me to MBSA and then to him — he began by contacting Moodley to apologise. “There are processes within our organisation for customer issues to be raised to the appropriate levels for resolution,” he said.
“The client should have access to all management within our organisation and should never have to turn to external parties. There is no excuse for the manner in which this matter was handled and for that I am truly regretful.” He vowed it would be fully investigated and the necessary corrective procedures and sanctions applied, “to ensure that this does not ever happen to another client”.
So what went wrong with that maintenance plan start date? That remains a mystery. “Mr Moodley is the first owner of the vehicle and should have had a maintenance plan that expired in February of 2024,” Essack said. But according to MBSA’s system, the plan was activated in October 2017 by Garden City Motors Shelly Beach.
“I have gone through the deal file and all the relevant documentation and unfortunately don’t understand why, and can't apply any insight or logic to it,” Essack said. “However, it is clear that the error occurred on our side and the client should not be prejudiced in any way.”
The franchise offered to pay half of Moodley’s two-year extended maintenance plan fee, effective from this month, which he has accepted. In a similar case I reported on a few years ago, a woman bought a new BMW from a Sandton dealership, and its “Motor Plan” warranty expired five months earlier than it should have, because it was activated by the dealership five months before she signed the deal.
Her subsequent investigations revealed that sometimes such warranties are activated without the car being sold — for example, when a customer cancels a deal at the last minute. Another customer later buys the car off the new-car showroom floor, doesn’t check the warranty details and finds out much later that the warranty on their car is a few months short. So this is definitely something to add to your checklist before signing that new-car contract.
• Contact Knowler for advice with your consumer issues via e-mail consumer@knowler.co.za or on X (Twitter) @wendyknowler
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