LR Dealers

[swisstoni]

I'm new to the marque and pretty unimpressed so far with my local franchised Land Rover dealership. Anyone got anything good to say about ones within a reasonable distance of say, Windsor?
I won't be naming and shaming.

[grand cherokee]

frankly my experience with three dealers has been less than impressive

the problem is that the 'brand' is so successful dealerships don't have to work to sell cars - customers come to them to spend money

when I was looking for a used L405 with a budget of up to £80K without finance I rang all over the UK - less than 50% bothered to come back to me with suitable cars

mind you its not just LR - was looking for a Porsche 911 up to £70K as a summer 'toy' and got a similar level of disinterest from main dealers!

my L405 is back again today at main dealers for warranty issues - 'one touch' locking is still intermittent - works one minute and then not the next

deployable side steps are 'out of synch' - drivers side retracts as it should - passenger side takes two minutes - dealer said a software update was needed from LR - this is after drivers side step was replaced recently when the stainless steel started to rust!

problems with DRL's - the 'angel eyes' are not working so 'sidelight' comes on

main dealer has far too few courtesy cars because they insist the vehicles should be LR - I'd happily accept a Ford Ka/Focus

if you want a courtesy car you need to books weeks in advance

[Crumpet]

I know what you mean. At my local dealer I found sales to be arrogant and unprofessional. Their service department is excellent, though (which is handy, given that it's been back five times in less that a year).

Too far from you but my Dad had decent service from sales at Farnell in Bradford.

[Chaffs]

It's a fair point, actually the cars sell themselves, but a little way up the M4 from Windsor, but Alastair at LR Reading has been good to me, and whilst I didn't end up buying from him (Duckworth in Lincolnshire - again good service and keen to deal), I'll certainly use them for servicing, based on this and previous experience of them.

[sealtt]

Some salesmen have been great, some rubbish. Just the way it is with such a big operation I suppose, the key is finding the right individual salesman rather than the right dealer perhaps.

[swisstoni]

Chaffs said:

It's a fair point, actually the cars sell themselves, but a little way up the M4 from Windsor, but Alastair at LR Reading has been good to me, and whilst I didn't end up buying from him (Duckworth in Lincolnshire - again good service and keen to deal), I'll certainly use them for servicing, based on this and previous experience of them.

As I've now bought, it's the service side of things that I'm now interested in. I may give Reading a try - about 25 mins away from me so no problem.

[sealtt]

I think service side they are way over subscribed, just too much work and hardly able to keep up.

That's my impression of things. Not that there is any issue with the work itself in general, although I did notice one small mistake on a job where a trim wasn't cut properly - had to do it myself with kitchen scissors... on a 100k car... lol... really shouldn't have happened, but generally they are very good at the work itself & mostly it's the admin side of things which sucks.

Call backs, booking times, updates, courtesy cars - all things I'd class as admin work, all terribly badly executed. Just don't think they really have the system / structure in place yet to cope with the demand. Just my presumption, they should certainly be pulling in enough cash to do it properly!

[swisstoni]

Ok so no great improvement over my current place on that side. One silly thing that I hate about it is that it is always absolutely rammed with vehicles. There's no place to park usually and just seeing them moving cars around makes me think the odd ding is inevitable.

[alxce]

I can vouch for LR Reading, I bought my RRS from them, they have serviced it over the last two years and I have been very satisfied with the whole experience.