Buy British if you dare

[Guest Wilf N]

Quality seems to be a thing now far away from our shores.I find that even now some motorhome owners will thank a manufacturer for doing major repairs (Ref M.E.Lakin letter in MMM)on a vehicle that is clearly not built properly. A friend of mine bought a new Lunar and after a few weekd had all manner of bad british build problems from curtains dropping off to water ingress and even having to open the entrance door to access the cutlery drawer.Back to the very nasty dealer and now it is a matter of money back please. More people should take this stance instead of the usual so called teething problems. Surely a teething problem is just that. If poor quality materials are put with production line bad quality builders the answer is simple.A very long standing friend of mine works for a national motorhome manufacturer. His team can build a motorhome in 12 minutes, take home many hundreds of pounds a week and only work four and a half days.When I ask him about quality he always says that this word is used in literature, to the buying public and applied to favourable press releases, he promises to find out its meaning. Over to you, Wilf N

[Guest Bill]

It's not only new vehicles. My AutoTrail is cunningly designed so that the lowest point on the roof is around the rooflight: when it rains, guess where the puddle forms? The result is rotten timbering in the roof. OK, it's 15 years old, so I'm not complaining too much, except to say it was so easily avoidable with just a smidgen of common sense. The fun started when I began getting quotes to fix it. One shop quoted £3000, another £400 - for the identical job!! Truly we live in Rip-off Britain. Will the last person to leave please turn the lights off.

[Guest Mike C]

Hello Wilf, See the many other postings on this forum about reliability and poor build quality. The Caravan Club survey showed that 25% of all caravans delivered to the owner had at least one fault and this performance had not improved since 1999. As the major caravan manufacturers are also the major motor caravan manufacturers presumably we can expect the same poor level of performance. In many cases these faults are not being picked up and corrected by the dealers. The answer lies with us, as long as we keep buying and taking delivery of units with faults the reliability will not improve. Remember British built bikes and cars, where are all those companies now? Regards, Mike C.

[Guest Mel B]

I'm with Wilf on this one - I'm getting fed up of reading people saying thankyou for fixing a problem that shouldn't have been there in the first place and then thinking the dealers etc are wonderful ... if they were all that wonderful then the problems wouldn't have been there in the first place as PDI should've picked them up! This isn't just restricted to British built either, some of the major foreign vans have atrocious problems as well. If you get these sort of problems and it forces you to be out of pocket to go back to get it fixed, make sure that you get your fuel costs covered at least, why should you pay out on top of everything else, maybe hitting them in the 'pocket' will start making them think about sending out problem vehicles so that they spend more time on them in the first place! (I know, I'm living in cuckoo land!)

[Guest David Powell]

At the malvern show, some one who was looking over the same 'van as us, remarked that the British do not build a bad van now. They build good 'vans badly.