Ford 5 year warranty – will they or won’t they?

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According to an article on the Car Dealer Magazine website a source has been quoted as saying that Ford are planning to join the long warranty bandwagon and offer 5 year warranties on all their cars.

According to Car Dealer Magazine the source said: ‘I’ve been told by someone in the Ford hierarchy that this is a move they plan to make. As with all good stories it slipped out over a few drinks, but I’ve no reason to believe it’s untrue.”

Well a representative from MTI was party to a very similar conversation “over drinks” at the recent press launch for the new Ford Focus (who knows it may even have been the same drinks) and talk of extended warranties for the Ford range was most definitely played down. It was noted that market research carried out by Ford told them that extending their warranty further would not be “cost effective” as they believed it would only improve sales for car brands that were either relatively new (and therefore untested) or were perceived to have suffered from reliability issues in the past. Neither of these, it was pointed out, apply to Ford.

From our point of view, and the point we made during the conversation, extending the manufacturer warranty beyond the traditional 2-3 years shows a car buyer a certain degree of faith that the manufacturer has in their own product. Not only that, as mentioned to in the Car Dealer Magazine article, it would go a long way to retaining customers at dealership service centre’s beyond the 3 year MOT.

A senior Ford source told us that they thought the Vauxhall “Lifetime Warranty” scheme had seemed a bit rushed and perhaps a knee-jerk reaction to what other manufacturers were doing. On that, to be fair, they may have a point as perhaps the Vauxhall warranty should be called Lifetime Warranty Asterisk.

The truth is that as more manufactures do join the bandwagon and extend the warranties on their cars then everyone will surely have to follow suit.

It is probably only a matter of time.