apg said:
Well over a decade ago, there was a small coterie of knowledgeable, hard-core 4X4 folks at LRNA who proposed something radical. A "mothership" and "satellite" type of dealership. A major location in a hub city with smaller locations in other nearby towns maybe with a new vehicle or two on the lot but with the parts and service availability.
This might as well been papal heresy, and I believe the instigators were bannished to the outermost reaches of the realm. Land Rover corporate wanted to keep the air of exclusivity, and the big dealerships was the way to accomplish that.
As I mentioned in a concurrent thread, never has any corporate entity made as many stupid decisions as Land Rover, yet somehow survived.
Wasn't this part of a thread a few months ago? I loved the idea, and I think it was Alyssa who said that her former dealership was a test-bed for such and it was horrible....
I think, though, that it must have been her particular market....
Cost/money/asking price of a new Rover aside, it'd be foolish to buy a new Rover here where I'm at, IMHO, w/o being an addict who is going to wrench on it yourself. Knoxville and Asheville are a bit of a drive from here. It might not be too far to go to shop and buy a vehicle, but it's too far to expect to have decent dealership support. And, new Rovers aren't Series.... the Def/D1/RRC was the last of the "easy (enough) to work on" vehicles... you can do a lot on a P38 but how many electrical nightmares have we heard of w/ them? The RRC? How about the LR3 for the do-it-yourself fella w/ a set of wrenches in the garage? An RRS?
Even when I had my old '81 Wag, I found dealer support useful. I had problem with it (this is before I started doing a lot of my own wrenching, and big part of why I do my own now), and a local shop kept working on it and kept working on it, and they couldn't get it to run smoothly... they'd work on it, say it was done, and it'd not run 15-minutes before I had it back to the shop, over and over... (and unfortunately, they were about the best shop in that particular town, gack...) finally, I gave up on them trying to refix it and drove over to the next town and took it to the dealer. They had it running smoothly the next day.... the other shop had the distributor off by a tooth, and you just couldn't get it timed....
We all have heard the stealership stories, etc. No garage is perfect. But, you should at least have the ability to take a vehicle to a local dealer that has a reasonable knowledge of the vehicle. If there was an official LR garage in town here in Kingsport, or even in Bristol or Johnson City, then I could see that someone at least could take it there for support, even if it was bought from the main dealership in Knoxville, or delivered from them to the .... the satellite makes a lot of sense for this area, if LRNA isn't going to have a dealership here.
But, back to the gist of the root of the problem: the machines are becoming too complex for dependable use in the backcountry. Trailside fixes are becoming a thing of the past with the newer ones. Although they may be keeping up with impressive abilities off of the showroom floor, they're becoming giant gizmo toys instead of expedition backbones or even the stuff that they're heritage was founded on....
FWIW, IMHO....