There's been a growing trend in the auto performance aftermarket of issues with vendors being thrown into the public forum. Going to internet forums is more or less the 'nuclear' option to wrestle a vendor into complying with a situation. No matter what the vendor loses.
In this situation, a 3rd party product (Alientech PowerGate) was faulty. Knowing the distance and time zone difference from Florida to Hong Kong and lack of support that I could potentially offer, I offered a refund on the purchase. A few days later, we receive a PayPal claim with inconsistencies in it. Our first tarnish on a perfect PayPal record. Irregardless of that, the process went forward.
Our warranty deadline is 15 days from the time the customer receives the product. Alientech is 30 days. PayPal had a 45 day window. We didn't receive the product back within 45 days. We could not return it to the manufacturer or receive an exchange on another Programmer. So the case was dropped by all parties involved.
Months later, I receive the faulty Programmer. It can't be reused or warrantied at this point. We receive a few emails and now this thread in a very public forum to try to push us into complying to a refund well outside of it's deadline.
Below is the email response provided today.
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Ian,
The item was received more than 2 months later. All refund deadlines have passed. Both PayPal's and my own. I could not warranty this Programmer to Alientech for reimbursement as their warranty deadline has passed. Because of this this, I cannot refund the purchase.
The objective of receiving the Programmer back was to submit a claim to Alientech about the incident and get reimbursed for the hardware cost. As it stands now, the Programmer cannot be refunded through the manufacturer or used on another car.
I offered to refund the purchase because of the situation. I reached out to you about logistics and have copies of email receipts from the sales@drivermotorsport.com. Despite this I was contacted by PayPal for a claim and got a negative mark on what was a spotless PayPal record. The PayPal claim submitted had inconsistencies with the facts stating we haven't responded to you and you received an item that was a different model than you were told to have purchased. Nothing of that nature happened. It was a defective item and we offered to take care of it. Irregardless, the PayPal 45 day claim deadlines were not met, so PayPal closed the case.
I'm sorry about the situation, I wish things were handled a bit differently. It'd been less stressful on everybody involved if it were.
Regards,
Bronson
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Side Note,
For future reference, we've warrantied these situations before. If they were done inside the timeline they're taken care of. For example, the Programmer failed on a Scirocco in Hong Kong. So we took the ECU and we began looking into the issue. Our Software guy who is developing our own in-house tools found that it is an encrypted immo block on ROW Golf R MED9.1 ECUs. If the ECU doesn't see all 5 blocks flash it will do this. The tool receives a complete command and is taken to a successful programming mode but the rolling code in the e2p doesn't match the flash and throws an immobilizer error.
That's all I'm commenting on the situation. A warranty situation got thrusted into the public domain so I feel obligated to bring in the data I have to defend DM in the situation.
