Monday, October 02, 2006
Oh no! Breakdown
Not long after our second outing, the car started acting as if the battery was low and struggled to turn the engine over at start-up. I put the battery on charge that night and the following morning despite a full battery the car was a non-starter, this was twice as bad as normal because we had a wedding to attend that day. In the end we had to give up the car as dead and ride my scooter to the wedding, no-one believed us when we told them how we’d arrived!
We called Land Rover Assistance the following day, who couldn’t find our vehicle on their database which meant that we might not be covered under their warranty or breakdown service. After taking a credit card number they agreed to come out and attend to the problem while they investigated our warranty coverage.
An engineer came out and worked on the car for 3 hours taking the bumper off and lights out in the process! He couldn’t trace the fault, declaring the battery, fuses and other start related components to be in full working order. Later, the car was recovered onto a flatbed truck, much to the children’s entertainment for further investigation at the main dealer.
The i-mob came in handy at this point allowing me to check the vehicles whereabouts that evening and the next day. I was able to locate the recovery company’s storage site, tell when it was on the road and again once it had been delivered to the main dealer.
As part of the vehicle recovery we’d been provided with a Nissan X-trail to keep us mobile but this definitely wouldn’t be man enough to pull our caravan. The main dealer reported that we required a new starter motor that would arrive in two days time. The next day Land Rover Assistance insisted that we were changed into a Land Rover product which meant moving all the car seats from the X-trail to a new Range Rover. Just as Ali waved goodbye to the X-trail, the dealer rang up to say the starter motor had come a day early and our car was ready for collection! Another car seat transfer later and we were back in our own motor.
