My cynical side is saying to me, 'why is there an instant 6k off the list price of a brand new car?' :rubchin:

Either they're overpriced to start with, or they're having difficulty shifting them

Steve

JJ, that says a lot about your Skoda dealer, or maybe the attitude you show towards them.

If one of my cars breaks under warranty I expect it to be fixed, I dont expect to be told i'm a liar or that they cant get a part for a month etc etc.

Basically, the attitude of ALL the Skoda dealers round my way stinks, which is probably why most of them have closed due to lack of business.

I treat people as I would expect to be treated, when I go into a dealer with a faulty car I will be polite and friendly, If I dont get the same in return I will remind them that I am a customer and that I expect to get a certain level of service, and I expect them to be polite and friendly to me, if they persist in being downright rude and unhelpfull I'll punch them in the face.

I've only ever experienced such poor attitude and level of service from Skoda dealers, none of the other dealers are like this, and I've got Fords, Vauxhalls, Toyotas, Nissans, Hondas, Chryslers, Jaguars, Mercedes, VW's etc etc, so I've been in most of them.

From my experience of renault (Clio 172 and 1.2dynamique) i wouldnt have one.

plus bury motors(local renault dealers) are the most incompetent bunch of morons in the world!

In the 2.5 years of renault ownership, my 172 spent 4 of the 6 months i owned it at the dealers.. and the 1.2 16v (which has fame as the Clio vRS/WRX) had every part on the engine apart from the block itself replaced in the 2 years i owned it.. it took them 18k miles from new to sort a scratch out on the instrument binnacle which ended up with them changing the whole unit and resetting the mileage to zero

JJ, I can understand your frustration with bad dealers, but "we need to get the parts from the factory" can be a genuine reason for a delay in a repair.

I'd also suggest that saying "Skodas are rubbish because I've had bad dealer service (in Essex?)" doesn't come over well, particularly in a text medium.

When I needed a new rear brake calliper for my Clio it took a week for Renault to remember they made a diesel Clio with rear disks.

JJ, I can understand your frustration with bad dealers, but "we need to get the parts from the factory" can be a genuine reason for a delay in a repair.

I'd also suggest that saying "Skodas are rubbish because I've had bad dealer service (in Essex?)" doesn't come over well, particularly in a text medium.

Close, I'm in East Sussex, but I dont recall actually saying "Skodas are rubbish because I've had bad dealer service" ??

My opinion of Skoda dealers has been well voiced, and my opinion of the cars too, which is a shame to be honest, because if the cars didn't all have serious design flaws and were actually as reliable as Skoda make them out to be, they would be good cars (except the MK1 Fabia which is just horrible).

Believe me, when we started buying up Skoda's for the cab fleet we so wanted them to live up to the reputation they seemed to be creating for themselves, the result was that we stopped buying them, if the product had been a bit better we could put up with a bad dealer, as we'd hardly ever see them, alas it wasn't to be, weekly visits to a bad dealer soon put you off.

Which is where the Renault comparison comes in, even though the cars were generaly unreliable (though no worse than the Skoda's), the dealer was happy to get things fixed and be as helpfull as possible, hence you can put up with the problems a little longer.

And I'm sorry but a 1 month wait for an essential part on a vehicle that is a wage earner is totally unacceptable.

FREE CAR for 24hours!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

... ok so its only a Laguna but they are offering free 24 / 48 hour test drives.

Car is delivered and collected from your home address by Avis and you can opt for no follow-up contact from Renault so there is no sales pressure etc

Useful if anyone has any trips planned where you don't want miles piled on your own car

Heres the link...

New Laguna

JJ,

Fair enough, but one of my mates runs a small taxi firm; not only is it all Skoda (TDis), but he also has an Octy vRS as his personal car. Also most of the Glasgow private hire fleet seem to be Octys, and an increasing part of the Dumbarton taxi fleet is Octys and Superbs. This makes me think that either you were unlucky, or your problems were down to the acceptedly cr@p Sussex dealers, rather than the cars themselves.

A nonsensical firewall bug is stopping me quoting in this thread.

JJ,

Fair enough, but one of my mates runs a small taxi firm; not only is it all Skoda (TDis), but he also has an Octy vRS as his personal car. Also most of the Glasgow private hire fleet seem to be Octys, and an increasing part of the Dumbarton taxi fleet is Octys and Superbs. This makes me think that either you were unlucky, or your problems were down to the acceptedly cr@p Sussex dealers, rather than the cars themselves.

A nonsensical firewall bug is stopping me quoting in this thread.

Agreed, poor dealers did play a big part in our dropping Skoda, we have a fleet of over 130 cars currently, which is about to expand on 18th Feb by another 40 cars, as we have bough out 2 other local cab firms and are expanding into the next town, we are also replacing our existing Autocab GPS system with an Auriga system.

As you can imagine we buy alot of cars, yet still Skoda treated me like a low life, dont get me wrong, I dont expect to be treated differently to someone buying just one car (except perhaps a bit more discount), but to treat any customer the way they treated me is criminal, and to be frank, there loss.

We could have probably kept them open for a significant amount of time just looking after our cars, let alone new purchases, but they insulted me, refused to apologise and so I withdrew all our business from them, 2 months later they were bankrupt.

The vast majority of Octy's you will see as cabs are MK1's, very few company's/drivers (in comparison to bought mk1's) are buying Mk2's, there are simply better cars for the money, Superbs are generaly ok reliability wise, but if the price goes up with the MK2 Superb as it did with the MK2 Octy, then expect to see alot less of them as cabs for the same reasons.

It's part of the drive to grab some extra bucks I suppose. Skoda is trying to push thinks a little bit up market and charge a bit more for that. But to do that they increase the complexity of the cars which increases the chance of things going wrong. The Mk 1 will be mechanically and electronically simpler and that makes faults less likely in the first place and cheaper/easier to fix when the happen. I'll be surprised if the Korean manufacturers don't pick up on this and we start to see larger Kias and Hyundais in taxi fleets. Kia's 7 year 100k warranties must be appealing.

JJ, agree with everything you say about the mk1 Octy wrt the mk2.

I'd not stand for the treatment you report from a garage either. All I'm saying is that that makes the garage in question, rather than the marque they sell, rubbish.