If you show up with that warranty, the service manager will look at you cross eyed and ask you “Where did you get this?”
No matter what you say, he’ll almost certainly say they won’t honor the warranty
I say almost certainly, because if he’s drunk or high on crystal meth, he might honor the warranty
No offense intended to anybody, by the way
If it is a factory or dealer warranty, the specs will be defined in the owners manual/warranty part. Thats where all the fine print is. There should be a reference to that on the single sheet your have. If its an after-market, all bets are off.
I have never had a problem with a manufacturers warranty, but I have never purchased an aftermarket warranty.
ken green Read, Read, Read! Excellent advice. You can count on getting numerous song and dance routines at the dealership. They count on the customer never having read the warranty. Unfortunately most of the time they are correct. Reading warranties saved me a bit of money twice. The first time was when our 1991 Jeep had a bit over 5,000 miles. It suddenly had a grinding noise from the right front wheel. I had it towed to the dealership. We had towing insurance. The diagnosis was brake caliper failure which also damaged one or both brake pads. When I arrived to pick up the Jeep there was no charge for replacing the caliper. There was a parts and labor charge for replacing the brake pads. $90 parts and labor. I remembered (I was much younger then and could actually remember things.) something addressing this situation in the warranty where the pads would be covered. I was informed that this was not true. I excused myself and went to the Jeep in the parking lot retrieving the warranty. Under items not warranted were the normal maintenance/wear items including the usual brake pads/shoes and clutch discs. It included a statement something like: If a non warranty item is damaged or destroyed by the failure of a warranted item it will be covered under warranty. They were flabbergasted that this could exist. Yeah right. Even without this revelation the $90 charge was ridiculous. Parts $34 (I could go to the dealership’s parts counter and buy the pads for $24), labor $56 when there was no additional labor involved. That’s how most dealerships operate. Don’t ever trust them. The second time was when the ABS light came on and stayed on at about 40,000 miles. Under severe pressure by the sales manager I finally agreed to a dealership extended warranty that went from $1500 to $500. They offered to just add it to the contract. I determined that that would only be about $200 interest over 5 years and wrote a check. It paid off as the dealership fantasy price to repair the ABS was $1400 and would take 2 days to get the parts and another day for the repair. I said that was fine as a rental car was covered by the warranty. The service manager puffed up, put on his you must be freaking crazy face and stated the (yawn) same old "that is not true). From my previous experiences. I had the warranty in hand which clearly stated that warranty repairs exceeding one working day would provide the customer with a loaner/rental car until the repair was completed. The service manager was still trying the denial. They had no loaner cars. What else do they do with demos? I requested that he call Enterprise Rental which was about 2 blocks and tell them I would arrive in a few minutes to pick up a car which they would be paying for. he did that. I got a Camry (yawn) but I just needed transportation. Jeep repair was completed with no charge.
I would never buy a car that I thought I might need an extended warranty for.
There’s a concept in reliability engineering called “infant mortality”. What that means is that a defective part fails very quickly upon being put into service. Any infant mortalities will be well within the manufacturer’s coverage.
From that point foreward, the probability of something failing drops dramatically for the first years of service. In a modern car that’s perhaps the first 200,000 miles, wherin it will slowly start to climb at an increasing rate. It’s shaped like a sectioned side view of an old cast iron bathtub, so it’s called a “bathtub curve”.
Typically the manufacturer’s warranty will cover any infant mortalities as well as powertrain failures up to 50,000 to 100,000 miles. “Extended warrantees” typically cover the car from 100,000 to 200,000 miles, that area where any premature failures would have already occurred and normal wear failures are highly unlikely. And they indemnify themselves against too many of the failures with opaque exemption clauses like “abuse”, “maintenance”, and “normal wear”. They’re providing very expensive insurance that actually covers very, very little, and only during the period of the car’s life where the likelihood of failure is very, very low. Like all insurance, they prey on insecurities, using costs of things like transmission and engine replacements to scare people, but in reality the probability of actually having such a failure during that very-low-failure-probability period and NOT having it exempted by one of their escape clauses is extremely low.
Extended warrantees are IMHO a rip off.
Any chance the form you have looks like this? This is mandatory on used cars but can be open to interpretation depending upon what is or is not checked and notated.
@mountainbike Yes, I spend considerable time explaining the “bathtub curve” during reliablility workshops. The flat part (the bottom) of the curve varies in length for different kinds of equipment and cars. It’s very long for typical Japanese cars, average length for US equipment and quite short for many European cars. That’s why you sell those when the warrany runs out.
In addition to the bathtub wearout and failure frequency curve, there are other forms of curves. Electronic equipment has the same initial infant mortality curve (or burn-in curve), but then the failure rate becomes a flat curve until there is suden failure at the end of the component’s life. Equipment subject the abrasion and friction has an upward slope.
Ironically if you superimpose a typical mechanical bathtub curve over the human mortality curve in Western countries, there is a very close fit. For humans the flat part of the curve has a slight upward slope.
Yup, that’s why there are so many used euro cars on the market for such “reasonable” prices.
My own human bathtub curve had a few high-amplitude spikes in it. The ticker didn’t tock right in 2007 and again in 2009.