Is the Lifetime Warranty Offered by Many Dealerships Actually Real?

A Lifetime Warranty on your car sounds pretty great, right? It sounds like you’ll be 100% covered for the life of your car and never have to worry about paying for expensive services for your vehicle, right? But is a Lifetime Warranty real? Usually when something sounds too good to be true, it’s because it usually is. At Volkswagen SouthTowne, where we have been Utah’s #1 Volkswagen dealer for volume sales and customer satisfaction since 2013* we believe that a Lifetime Warranty on your car is little more than an advertising hook. In fact, dealerships offer it because the steps to fulfill the warranty are sometimes so meticulous and hard to fulfill that they may be banking on a customer not being able to rely on it. 

Let’s look at a few of the reasons why Volkswagen SouthTowne does NOT offer a Lifetime Warranty with our vehicles:

Lifetime Warranties are Usually Handled by a Third Party

When a dealership offers a third party warranty, rather than a manufacturer warranty, things get murky. If they go out of business you won’t have a warranty. If the dealership ownership changes, you will no longer be covered. These often unproven companies may yet use outside insurance companies, but many of them do not have their warranties supported by insurance. Many times they are banking on you not being able to fulfill all the steps or have all the right documentation to prove your case and make sure your warranty is properly backed.

Lifetime Warranties Require a Lot of Hoops to Jump Through

Many dealers offering Lifetime Warranty won’t tell you all that is required of you to rely on your warranty. If you decide to take a Lifetime Warranty make sure you ask to read the fine print! You may have to have your vehicle service at that dealership at the prescribed mileage intervals. Anything short of this may void your warranty. In fact sometimes they require you to do MORE service than is required by your manufacturer. Further, you will usually have to keep copies of all your Repair Orders for all of those maintenance services. And you’d also have to make sure that any warning lights are dealt with immediate. You also may have to call your Lifetime Warranty company and get pre-approval before getting any service done on your vehicle. This can be a huge pain when all you need to do is get your car fixed.

Lifetime Warranties Offer Inadequate Coverage

If it is not on the list it is not covered. And usually the items on the Lifetime Warranty are parts that are rarely going to fail. According to this article Lifetime Warranties usually don’t cover seals or gaskets, which are the most common parts to fail. So basically Lifetime Warranties essentially eliminate the most common reason you’d need to repair your engine or powertrain!

Lifetime Warranties Are Easily Voided

Another reason we don’t offer the Lifetime Warranty shtick at Volkswagen SouthTowne is that they are so easily voided. Basically your Lifetime Warranty can be null and void if you do everyday normal things like:

• • Moving – if you move your household 50 miles away, your Lifetime Warranty is voided. Are you really never going to move?
  • Towing – as soon as you tow a Uhaul or a boat, your warranty is dead
  • Modifying your vehicle! We have so many customers who love to add mods to their VW, but as soon as you do that your so-called Lifetime Warranty would be untenable.
  • Driving for commercial reasons. Want to write off your car for your business? Well if you want to keep your car under its Lifetime Warranty, you can’t. Also if you want to drive for Uber or Lyft – these are all examples of driving for commercial reasons and would void your warranty.

Free Lifetime Warranty is a Myth

One big reason a Lifetime Warranty is a scam is that many dealerships raise the prices of other items in order to purchase it for you. For example, if you inspect your dealer-arranged financing, you may find that they have raised the price of the car to a much higher amount than they originally advertised in order to pay for it. 

Another tactic is to charge well above a normal price for service appointments in order to pay for the so called “Lifetime Warranty,” which is a requirement of reaching the many required steps to receiving the benefits of a Lifetime Warranty. Both of these tactics result in a higher overall cost to the customer. So what seems like a “freebie” is actually a way of getting more money out of you.

Is Lifetime Warranty Worth It?

The so-called lifetime warranty often doesn’t start until the manufacturer warranty has expired. For Volkswagen right now that is 4 years. How long do you usually keep your cars? Most of our customers change out every 2-4 years. In fact the nation average is 39 months. So why pay more money and jump through all those hoops just to get something you probably won’t use? In fact most dealerships who offer these kinds of Lifetime Warranties are betting on you never being able to use it.

Lifetime Warranty Guarantees Your Service Business

When you sign up for a Lifetime Warranty with a dealership you are committing to their service department for the life of your in order to ever be able to rely on it. What if their service department is disappointing? What if they have no availability and you’re in a bind? What if they aren’t able to fix your car or can’t properly diagnose the problem? You’ll be without options because their Lifetime Warranty is null and void if you don’t service your car with them.

Being locked into servicing your car at that dealership in order to keep your Lifetime Warranty in tact is just one of the stifling rules of such a program.

These are a few of the many reasons why we prefer not to dupe our customers into taking a Lifetime Warranty. For any other questions, leave a comment below or visit Volkswagen SouthTowne, located just off the west side of I-15 between 106th and 114th south. We’d be happy to talk you through how we work hard to earn and keep your business using fair prices, a transparent sales process, and avoiding cheap tactics like these.

*Based on well documented Volkswagen of America retail reports 2014-current YTD.

But don’t take our word for it! Do your own research. Here is an article by Jalopnik weighing the pros and cons of the Lifetime Warranty. And here is a great video the Chevy Dude did about the scam of the Lifetime Warranty.

Tags: inadequate coverage, lifetime myth, lifetime scam, lifetime warranty, lifetime warranty scam, scam warranty
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