Journal

Thursday, January 01, 2009

Whatever you do, don’t buy a Kia.

15 months ago we purchased a brand spanking new Kia Sedona from our local dealership in Reading. Right from the day we took delivery of the car things have just not been right. Initially it was ill fitted and scratched dashboard panels but after a week we also noticed that there was an intermittent problem with the electric sliding doors.

The electric doors simply failed to close correctly on regular occasions. This fault would manifest itself in a number of ways:

1. On attempting to close the door from either the fob, handle or internal controls it would slide to a closed position and then open up fully immediately of it’s own accord. Sometimes it would take up to 18 attempts to get the door to close. So much for the convenience of an electric sliding door (one of the features that attracted us to the car in the first place).
2. On attempting to close the door (as above) it would close fully but then open by about 1 inch of it’s own accord some 5 or 6 seconds later. Giving you just enough time to get in the car and drive off with the children in the seats. The door then ‘flinging’ fully open once in motion.

We reported the problems to the Evans Halshaw Kia dealership and arranged for the vehicle to go back in for repair. The fit of the dashboard panels was rectified but the dealership claimed that they could not reproduce the problem with the doors yet for us it persisted.

The car was booked in again, again returned without a solution and booked back in again and again and again… we even provided the dealership with video footage of the fault since we felt they simply did not beleive us.

On one particular occasion we drove to the dealership to drop the car off and collect a courtesy vehicle with all 3 kids in tow only to discover that the courtesy car had no petrol and a faulty petrol cap, making it impossible for us to fill the vehicle.

Again and again we were fobbed off by the Evans Halshaw Kia dealership in Reading. We then discovered upon trying to book the car in one day that they had lost their franchise and that they would no longer be able to deal with the issues we had with the vehicle (Great!).

It took us some time to find a new local dealership that could provide a courtesy car. West London Motor Group Kia in High Wycombe in this case.

We booked the car in with them to see if perhaps they could resolve the issues with the electric sliding doors. Initially we encountered the same problems, they were unable to reproduce the problem with the doors but did replace a number of parts. Another visit later and still no joy. By now as you can well imagine the situation was no longer in any way amusing. We were having to ferry our children about in a car which we simply no longer felt safe in and were well and truly fed up with the frequent visits to and from the dealership.

We decided to contact Kia customer services in the vein hope that they might be able to sort things out for us and let us enjoy the car which we had paid good money for.

After applying a fair degree of pressure we eventually convinced Kia customer services to provide us with a like for like replacement vehicle for a period of a week while they had our vehicle in to resolve the issues with the doors.

Alas nothing with Kia is simple (or enjoyable)…

On dropping our car of at the dealership we realised that the replacement vehicle that they had provided would not accommodate 3 children in car seats. We called Kia and informed them, they claimed that the rental company had contacted us to ask if the car was ok and I had confirmed that it would be fine (a complete lie). I requested that they provide us with a new rental car that would accommodate the children such that we could actually go out as a family in one car (not an unreasonable request when we have purchased a £20k family car from them). They claimed that they could not provide a suitable vehicle (not what I had been told when they promised a like for like replacement in the first place) so I suggested that I could find a suitable rental vehicle myself and they could reimburse us the cost of said vehicle.

Whilst this seems like a reasonable suggestion and a logical solution which would leave them with a happy customer they initially refused to cover the costs. A couple of heated phone conversations later they finally did the right thing and agreed to pay for the rental vehicle that we had located. The rental firm that provided us with the unsuitable vehicle (via Kia) tried to sting us for damage to the rental car totaling £150 but that’s another story.

By now I’ve spent a considerable amount of time and energy trying to resolve the issues with the car and have had to take time off work on numerous occasions to deliver the car to the dealership and collect it again. By perhaps what can only be described as a stroke of luck, after having the car for a full week, the dealership managed to fix the problems with the door. Ironically this was the result of following instructions from a technical bulletin that had been issued by Kia regarding the lot from which our car was born… something which we suggested that both dealerships investigate a number of times.

You might think that this is the end of the story, alas it is not. Since collecting the car we have discovered that during icy weather the rear sliding doors now often refuse to open at all (again an intermittent issue) and the air conditioning has stopped working completely so we have the car booked in with the garage for ‘another’ visit on the 2nd of January.

Today (1st of January) whilst out with the whole family in the car I realised that the engine was not responding as it should, the car was loosing power on hills and struggling to maintain motorway speed. We managed to get off the motorway (not a great place to stop with 3 small children) and pulled up. With a burning smell and smoke emanating from the engine bay we decided not to proceed any further. Thank god we were following friends so they helped us to ferry the children back home and the very nice man from the AA came out to tow the car to the Kia dealership.

So the question now is what next… can we really ‘endure’ this car any more. We seem to have a lemon… a car built on a Friday perhaps? In any case the stress associated with this car has us considering our options… even if that means selling the car at a huge loss just to get into something reliable and safe for our family.

Kia are unwilling to even consider replacing the vehicle or making any kind of good will payment to alleviate the trouble we have had… apparently all we can expect from them is a free service and I simply don’t think that’s good enough.

Whilst dropping the car off at the dealership today with the nice man from the AA I happened across a chap eying some of the cars on the forecourt, he was looking to buy a new Kia Sorento. I advised him strongly against purchasing a Kia and relayed the story of how reliable and well built our Sedona is, he seemed convinced… so that’s about £20,000 I’ve just lost Kia.

I’ll continue to relay my story to every person I know and meet until I’ve lost Kia at least £1,000,000 in sales. With 5,000 unique visitors to this blog every month and an extensive social networking contacts list I’m pretty confident in my quest.

Update: Join the I promise to never buy a Kia Facebook group to show your support!

Friday, November 28, 2008

Wired In To Recovery

It was probably the end of May last year when I first met David Clark from the ‘Wired Initiative’. We (Nine Four) had been put in touch with David by our good friends at Voyage Design who were at the time working with David on a consultancy basis.

During our first meeting David talked with great enthusiasm about the vision which he had to create an online recovery community for those affected by substance misuse.

Although I don’t have a great deal of direct experience in the subject matter, the stories which David told me of instantly grabbed my attention and my interest. Since then we’ve been working with David and his amazing team (Kevin & Lucie) to design and develop the first phase of the ‘Wired In’ online recovery community and late last week the site finally went live.

I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with a number of content and community focused sites before, but the sheer volume and quality of content which the Wired In team have been pumping into the site over the past month or so has blown me away!

Kudos to David because he has funded this entirely out of his own pocket, using his retirement money to build a community that will empower people to tackle their drug and alcohol use problems.

Please take some time to visit Wired In and pass the URL on to friends and family.

Friday, October 24, 2008

ExpressionEngine Plug-in: UK Counties Select

Another day, another little ExpressionEngine Plug-in. I needed to return a list of UK counties in a standalone entry form. I could have simply flicked on PHP for the template and spewed forth a foreach from an array but I thought I’d wrap it all up in a plug-in instead, so here it is.

The ‘UK Counties Select’ plug-in simply renders a drop down select form element with an alphabetical list of UK counties. Usage of the plug-in is as follows:

{exp:np_uk_counties_select name="counties"}

I could add options to specify a class, id etc but for now this does the job just fine for me.

Download: pi.np_uk_counties_select.php.zip

Obviously let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts on how this can be improved. Enjoy!

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Migrating from TXP to EE - Step 5

ExpressionEngine does not provide a ‘native’ facility for recording links but the immense flexibility of ExpressionEngine Weblogs allows you to create your own links facility by just creating a new Weblog with the relevant custom fields (Title, URL & Description) and then setting up a related category group.

Just as we exported our article data from Textpattern we ‘could’ also export our Link data and then use the same import process to pull it into ExpressionEngine.

However this is not the route I’m going to take. Personally I would much rather maintain my ‘noteworthy’ links using a tool like Delicious so I’m going to show you how we can migrate our Textpattern links to Delicious and then have them displayed inline within an ExpressionEngine template.

Luckily for us there’s a fantastic Textpattern Extension called ajw_bookmarks that provides us with a quick and easy way to export our Links to a ‘Bookmarks’ file which most bookmark services and browsers can import.

Download and install the Extension within Textpattern and then navigate to the Bookmarks tab within Extensions and select the first option ‘Export bookmarks’.

Now that we have our locally saved Bookmarks file navigate to the Import Bookmarks tool on the Delicious website (obviously you will need to log-in first) and then choose the ‘Custom import’ option.

Now we want our bookmarks to be visible to the public so check ‘make all my imported bookmarks public’. If you wish to use Delicious to record bookmarks for personal use and also for display on your website you may want to tag all the bookmarks you are going to import with a keyword such as ‘noteworthy’ or similar. This is the approach I took. By adding this tag I can identify which bookmarks should be pulled out of Delicious for display on my website. Now click ‘Import Now’.

Delicious should have a bit of a think, depending on the size of your links collection and then display your imported bookmarks.

We’re going to use the ExpressionEngine ‘Magpie’ plug-in to pull our Delicious links into our template and display them inline. The plug-in will also cache the data so if Delicious should go down our site won’t fall apart. The Magpie plug-in is a part of the default ExpressionEngine install so just open up a template file and drop in the following code:

{exp:magpie url="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/nathanpitman?count=10&tag=noteworthy" limit="10" refresh="60"} <ul> {items} <li><a href="{link}" title="{title}">{title}</a><br /> {description}</li> {/items} </ul> {/exp:magpie}

Obviously you’ll have to replace ‘nathanpitman’ in the feed URL with your own Delicious username and if you want to pull back bookmarks with a particular tag then include the ‘&tag=’ parameter and variable in the querystring as I have above.

You should now have a nice unordered list displaying your 10 most recent Delicious bookmarks or my 10 most recent Delicious bookmarks if you forgot to change the username in the URL.

If you need to you can also tweak the number of minutes that the plug-in waits before it refreshes the feed display, I’d opt for 60 minutes. The Magpie plug-in defaults to 3 hours if you don’t specify a refresh value.

Monday, October 06, 2008

The great Staples ‘OrderCare’ scam

As a business (Nine Four) we have used Staples to purchase office supplies on a regular basis for the past couple of years. The last time I used the Staples website to place an order I noticed that the total for my goods was a little higher than I expected, I reviewed the basket again and noticed that a line had been added with the label ‘OrderCare’ and a small additional sum, between 2 and 3 pounds if I remember rightly.

What is ‘OrderCare’ you may wonder… here’s what Staples say on their website:

Staples OrderCare is a premium service which allows you to return unwanted items to us anytime within 12 months of purchase, for whatever reason.

and a little later on the same page:

If you are returning unwanted items between 3 and 12 months since your order, that are not in a resaleable condition, we reserve the right to charge a minimum restocking fee of £15 or 20% of the item’s selling price.

So basically Staples are (without first asking) charging all online customers (not sure if this also applies to phone and mail orders) a small additional sum for a service which they have not opted in to and that will in 99% of cases be of zero use above and beyond what is already offered in the basic returns service.

Now consider that I’m a scrooge and that as the business owner I look for every opportunity possible to reduce costs where suitable. In the vast majority of cases the individual ordering stationary will be an employee who does not really care if they are charged an additional small nominal sum (how do they calculate it!).

Add to all of the above that there is no way to have ‘OrderCare’ default to off on your account, you have to turn it off every time you make an order and this involves navigating to a pop-up window and checking a box to opt out rather than just giving the user the check box on the basket screen itself.

Imagine how much cash Staples are making every day out of businesses that are totally unaware of the fact that they are paying an additional charge for something they did not ask for.

I’ve taken our business elsewhere, perhaps you should do the same. Viking Direct also offer a similar ‘extended warranty’ service but as you would expect, it defaults to off and can be set at an account level. Good job.