VF Powersteer failure

[Sean880]

G'day panhead, old mate at holden care reckons that cost is not on their end. It's a dealership cost, apparently I have to pay the dealer this to have the test done.
Like you I would have thought being a holden fault it should be taken care of at their expense.

This is a dealership con job designed to try and extract cash out of customers for Holden warranty work. Dealers don't like doing warranty work, just customer paid work that generates most of the profits for the service centre.

It's only 150 bucks but I would stand them up on this as their attempt to charge you a fee is both inconsistent with the GMH Warranty and the terms of Australian Consumer Law which, by the way, is also directly applicable to the vehicle fault you have with the PS failure.

If you read the terms and conditions of your Holden Factory Warranty (it should be a number of pages in your service book) you will see that there is no basis whatsoever for the dealer, who is the party nominated by Holden to carry out the warranty repairs, to charge you anything to rectify a fault covered by warranty. You have a fault and the full cost of rectification, whatever types of work that may entail, is covered by that Holden Warranty.

You have advised them of the fault and it's the dealer's task under the terms of that Holden warranty (on behalf of GMH) to find the cause of that fault and rectify it for you free of charge to you. If that requires certain tests to be carried out to identify the cause or whatever, you most definitely cannot be charged for that because it is an integral part of the warranty service. It would be like advising you they need to drive the car to experience an engine fault or a suspension fault to be fixed under warranty and then charging you 200 bucks to do a half hour road test and then telling you the road test was not part of the warranty service - pay us $200 please.

Any testing that needs to be performed to rectify an issue under the warranty terms and conditions must be at no charge to you as it is not an excluded item (as servicing items in the maintenance list are). You should find sections in the warranty statement that read as follows but you may have a slightly updated version in your book.

"Voluntary Warranty Repairs Covered
Subject to your non-excludable Statutory Rights and the exclusions shown on the following page, this Voluntary Warranty covers the correction, of any manufacturing defect to materials or Holden workmanship and advised to a Holden dealer or Authorised Service Outlet, by repair or at Holden's option by replacement."

"No Charge
Warranty work performed under this Voluntary Warranty (including parts and labour) will be carried out at no cost to the vehicle owner. However this work should not be confused with servicing specified in the Maintenance schedule in this service booklet for which a charge is payable".

"How do I go about obtaining Holden Warranty Service.
It is the responsibility of the Selling Dealer to provide Holden Voluntary Warranty service, therefore, you should take your vehicle to the Selling Dealer whenever Holden warranty service is needed. However if this is not possible, you may go to any other Authorised Holden Dealer."

 

[BLOWN-WH]

Earlier electric steers have been in twice, there's several threads suggesting it may be a time bomb.

Ouch!!
Now I'm getting more and more paranoid about the whole electric power steering units failing on the VF's.
I originally did a little research before deciding to buy my WN and i did find a mention of that incident with the Taxi drivers complaining about the electric power steering failing but i guess my reaction to that was ok...Taxi = high kilometres so cause to failure but after reading all theses post on here about how many have suffered from the failure I'm really starting to worry now

Is it purely random chance when it fails or is there any contributing factors to it all??