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Old 12th Jan 2019, 8:47 pm   #52
Radio Wrangler
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Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: Fife, Scotland, UK.
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Default Re: Changing the throw away culture, BBC News

Length of warranty is quite interesting.

I was at a meet-the-customers doo for a very upmarket product of a sort best not disclosed on this forum. A British brand at that time under German ownership. Their brand had come under a lot of fire for poor reliability for years. In the presentation they banged on about their quality and prestige and how they'd completely turned around their reliability.

I pointed out that they gave a one year warranty, then pointed out that a down-market Japanese competitor gave a three ear warranty as standard, and then asked which company REALLY had confidence that their reliability was good.

There was a bit of a silence.

Then a voice with hardly a trace of accent replied "There is really no defence to this argument"

Job done!

A few months later, three year warranties were announced. I like to think I was one of the straws which broke the camel's back. Leastways I think I contributed

On all manufactured goods, the length of the warranty is a solid indication of how much trust the manufacturer has in his product.

My day job is with a manufacturer of radio stuff for a market which is rather concerned about reliability. Your reputation hinges on the reliability of your product and once we've shipped a radio or radar unit the only influence on the outcome is the standard to which we built it. It's like a moon shot. Once you've launched it, it's too late to do it any better.

Even so, problems will occur and how customers are handled makes a massive difference, as David, above, relates.

With good enough engineering, failures become rare and warranty costs little. If the manufacturer I met above only trusted his product so little, why should I trust it any more?

David
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