How often are you confident you got a totally fair deal in getting your car repaired? Not often? Well, sometimes, if you have the right information, you’ll wind up with a drastically reduced repair bill, or even no bill at all. How?
It’s all about what industry experts call “hidden warranties”. Search the term “automotive hidden warranty” on Google or Yahoo, and you’ll get a range of results that can keep you reading, and confused, for hours. In simple terms, these are unofficial warranties the manufacturers don’t publicize, because they’re typically about defects that were ‘born’ with your car – things destined to malfunction because of bad design or manufacture, or unanticipated circumstances. No surprise that car companies don’t want to publish lists of factory defects. So, like most things related to servicing your car, knowing how to handle a repair that literally ‘came with your car’ as a potential factory defect takes some serious separation of facts from fiction.
Let’s try to clear this up, at least at a fundamental level.
We all know about standard manufacturer’s warranties – typically something like "36 months or 50,000 miles, whichever comes first." Fortunately these warranties are vastly superior to those of even 10 years ago as the great majority are true ‘bumper-to-bumper’ warranties covering just about anything and everything that can go wrong with your car. Several car makers also add free routine maintenance to these, and some even stretch these out to 100,000 miles. Tires remain covered by their own manufacturer warranties. Simple enough, but hardly the whole story.
Extended warranties, those that the dealer sells for additional cost, usually take the simplicity and value of the standard warranty and muddy the waters. Virtually every consumer protection organization advises against extended auto warranties, citing their cost and the wiggle room contained in their incredibly complex ‘what’s covered’ language as key reasons to avoid them. Nonetheless, they are huge sellers, and you may well have purchased one originally, or had it transfer with a used car purchase. If you’ve got one, you may well find it valuable, depending on what actually breaks.
But, whether you have a standard or extended automotive warranty, at some point it expires due to mileage limits, or time. And now the key question – what happens when a car breaks down after the warranty expires but the cause of the breakdown is a factory defect that was literally built into the car? The answer is positively, absolutely…vague – it all depends.
One thing is certain - the key variable in whether you pay for this sort of repair is what you know about it. You can count on the dealer being aware of these sorts of defect/repair issues. Why? Because the federal government mandates accuracy in the system that captures and tracks all factory defects for their impact on safety. You are probably very familiar with the term ‘Safety Recall.’ Safety Recalls are simply those defects, caught in the elaborate tracking system of the government and the auto manufacturers for all the right reasons, which create a serious safety hazard from use of your car.
So what happens to the tracking of all those factory defects that do not result in a serious safety hazard? They don’t disappear! In fact, the National Highway Transportation Safety Board (NHTSB) maintains a complete, computerized database of them, called "Technical Service Bulletins". Many times the manufacturer will privately authorize their dealers to repair the defect at no cost to the car owner if there is a malfunction.
So imagine two customers with the same car, and exact same breakdown. One goes to the dealer with absolutely no idea that his car, out of warranty, has broken not out of routine use and age, but in fact because of a known defect. The dealer should know full well that this is the case, because they receive each and every one of the Technical Service Bulletins that the NHTSB requires the manufacturer to send to the dealer. This Technical Service Bulletin lays out all the details.
The other owner goes to the same dealer with a copy of the Technical Service Bulletin and asks the service manager to help him understand why it’s fair to pay for a repair that the manufacturer acknowledges was in fact a factory defect. In many cases, the dealer will be reimbursed for this repair by the manufacturer. And there you have it – while not all dealers care enough to ‘play fair’, many, if not most, will gladly reduce your bill, or even eliminate it when everyone involved can plainly see that the repair in question was in fact a factory defect.
How can you stay fully informed about the presence of Technical Service Bulletins (TSBs) for your cars? You could go to the NHTSB’s web site and check every month – its free, and its public. Or, you could sign up with a monitoring service (like TireVan's Advantage Program) which tracks your cars and alerts you when a new Safety Recall or Technical Service Bulletin is added.
You think your car doesn’t have any? Well that’s possible, but very unlikely – as of this writing, there are nearly 500,000 distinct and unique Technical Service Bulletins in the database covering every vehicle sold in the U.S. since 1966 – virtually all cars have at least two TSBs and many have 20-30 or more. This is one case where what you do know will not hurt you, and may even save you money.