I am writing to describe our purchase and service experiences thisfar with Land Rover. As background, I am a foreign service officer who lives/works in Africa and have owned and driven several Landrovers in Africa. Regretably, we have had a horrible experience both with the Landrover in Albuquerque, NM and in Chantilly, Virginia. Not only are the services associates rude and unhelpful, but they have cost us money and time that is simply unacceptable.
After buying our car in Chantilly, VA in August 2006, we found out that they did not have a second key as promised (we were only given one key), that they did not (and still have not) entered the extended warranty we paid for into the computer system and, to add insult to injury, the engine had to be replaced after 400 miles. and Chantilly did not have time for us so we had to take it to Rosenthal in Vienna, VA (who did a good job but they scratched the hood of the car while in the shop). We had to delay our move from Virginia to New mexico by two weeks and take leave from our jobs to wait for the engine to be put in (1 week after buying the "certified pre-owned car"). We called the service associate Richard Grzesiak dozens of times about the key and warranty and only once received a return call from him. His supervisor, Andy Levin, while somewhat better at returning our calls has not contacted us in weeks about our extended warranty.
In Albuquerque when they reprogrammed the new key that we finally received from Chantilly after 3 months and over 15 calls to the associate Richard Grzesiak, they deprogrammed our old key and made us pay to program the new one. Now we have one key that is not cut but is programmed, and another that is cut but is not programmed, so we have to carry around two keys. When we complained to the service associate (who charged us for the programming) he said that we should just go to a key shop to have it cut, but most shops don't cut that kind of key and clearly we should not be the ones paying for this to be done as it was not our mistake.
Overall, we have spent in excess of 15 hours dealing with Landrover, delayed our move from Virginia to New Mexico by weeks and made dozens of phone calls. We are absolutely disgusted with the service provided by landrover and the absolute lack of care or consideration given to us by landrover employees (however, to be fair, at Rosenthall one employee, Jack, stood out as the only person who appeared to care about the shoddy service we received.) We are looking to sell our Landrover and will never buy one again. Also, we plan to tell everyone we can about our experience. If it had been one error or one service associate we would have let it go, unfortunately, it has been in two locations with numerous employees.
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