Myself, & my immediate family have had aproximately 20 Fiats between us in the last 30 years or so. Our experience of the dealers, & especially the warranty procedure on new Fiats has been mixed, mainly bad.
Non Fiat enthuasiasts will not put up with this kind of behavior from Fiats warranty department, especially if they`ve previously had new cars from other companies who 99 times out of 100 will bend over backwards to make the customer happy & replace parts under warranty without breaking a sweat, most of the time providing a courtesy car & sometimes replacing things under warranty that you didnt even realise needed changing.
This is just another example of Fiat letting its customers down.
This is his own car, not leased or rented, he doesnt abuse his cars & he doesnt let his pupils abuse them either.
I`m 1/2 Italian, so buying Fiats (& Alfas) is natural, but even my parents have now given up on Fiat (& years of unrewarded patriotism) & recently got a Volvo instead after having Fiats for over 20 years straight. My uncles, aunts & cousins have all given up of Fiat, even the ones in Italy. All of us have been let down on many occasion by Fiats warranty procedure, which isnt worth the paper its written on.
Thinking about it, its only me that still has an Italian car in my family despite all of us owning numerous Fiat group cars in the past.
I love Fiat cars, I hate Fiats aftercare.
This is also a big reason why Fiat/Alfa always fall down so badly in JD Power surveys.
His previous car was a Vauxhall Corsa which suffered occasional clutch slave cylinder failure, whenever that happened Vauxhall replaced it completely free, no accusations made & always carried out the work with the minimum of fuss.
The Corsa didnt suffer a worn clutch till it had done nearly 40,000 miles (good for a driving school car), even then, it gave plenty of warning and they were replaced for less than 1/2 the cost of the Fiat one...
Are Fiat saying that his customers clutch abuse hase suddenly got 3 times worse in the 500 compared to the Corsa?
As far as I`m concerned, a 4 month old car with 12000 miles on the clock shouldnt have a clutch go & therefore the customer shouldnt have to pay a bean in this case, irrelivant to what job the car has.
I`ve worked for several car dealers over the last 30 years, I know about good & bad warranty handling & service departments who fob off customers.
Needs investigating even as a driving school car the clutch shouldnt do that.
But I / we bought 2 Fiats in a row... a 1.2 Stilo 6 years ago and my 1.9 MJet GPS 3 years ago... both are fine. The GPS had a re-map to 193Bhp at 32,000 miles and there is no clutch slip even now at 51,000.
I vote an unlucky punter, you are doing the right thing asking to see the removed bits, Fiat & the dealer should really do this in my opinion or, depending on findings, share some of the cost.
