Toyota’s global reputation for industry leading quality and customer service is well-established, a fact recognised by numerous surveys and the experience of Toyota drivers. Despite this, Toyota wants to underline their long term commitment to quality and to their customers, by extending the warranty on all new Toyota passenger cars that are registered after June 1st 2010.
So from now on, every new Toyota car is going to be coming with a 5 year 100,000 mile warranty.
Now you could be cynical and say this is to try and get back the business and customers they lost because of the (in our opinion unfair) publicity they got earlier in the year, when they had to announce a number of recalls on their products and that’s probably in part at least true. Toyota however see it as a mark of their confidence in their products and that it underlines their long term commitment to their customers, which I guess you can’t disagree with.
Whilst some smaller manufacturers such as Kia have offered a 7 year 100,000 warranty for some time now and Hyundai, offer a 5 year unlimited mileage warranty, these were very much seen as marketing tools to build trust in their cars, and hoping to encourage customers that have never owned them before to take the risk and indeed, when combined with good prices, there is no doubt its worked for them.
However, Toyota are the first of the big players to offer such a comprehensive warranty, as the vast majority of their competition, such as Ford & Vauxhall only offer a 3 year 60,000 mile warranty.
Its obvious, I think why Toyota have done this, but that aside, you have to ask how other manufacturers are going to respond, because ok, I accept its not everyone that keeps a car for 5 years, so not everyone that will see the benefit of it, however suppose you do your 100,000 miles in 3 years, it does mean that you will have the warranty up to that 100,000 miles, whilst your Honda, Vauxhall or Ford would have run out 40,000 miles before and there is no doubt the longer warranty is an attractive selling point.
So its well done Toyota and its watch this space to see which of the other big players makes the next move!
