Why BYD customer service sucks in Australia
If you’re about to drop $50,000 on an electric vehicle from upstart carmaker BYD, you might like to hear about the customer ‘support’ one Canberran couple received after a major battery failure on the highway…
A family in Canberra has been taken through the consumer law ringer after their BYD Atto 3 electric vehicle broke down as a major battery failure.
Ian and Kate Cool - that’s literally their name - were self-proclaimed cheerleaders for Chinese electric car company BYD, until recently.
Mrs Cool and her progeny even posed for the front page of the Canberra Times, gushing over their Atto 3 just over a year ago. Sadly though, the Cool's dream of integration into the fantasy world of electric Utopia has become something of a nightmare.
The vehicle's miraculously durable and revolutionary blade battery failed without warning at 100km/h when just over a year old and with only 33,000 kilometres on the odometer.
Unfortunately, BYD seemed forget all about its Australian Consumer Law obligations.
Source: News.com.au
This incident happened at highway speeds and not knowing what was happening, Mrs Cool managed to pull over over safely, thankfully. The battery had catastrophically failed and even BYD agreed that the miraculously durable blade battery was stuffed - although not in those words.
That's about the time the ‘Build Your Dreams’ customer service machine started treating them like imbeciles.
What happened next?
First they insinuated we didn't charge the car which always puts you on the wrong foot
More than 2 weeks later the Cools were informed that the 60kWh battery had indeed failed and needed to be replaced under the 8-year warranty.
Dealing with them in person, when my wife dropped off the car we were quite angry with how they were treating us.
The Cools decided to seek a full refund for the car arguing that the failure of the battery constituted a major failure under Australian Consumer Law.
Here’s what BYD claims their customer service is all about:
This is what the ACL tells business and in particular, the car industry, in regard to diagnosing major failures and their obligations to consumers with regard to what they should do next:
And here’s what their actual response to the Cools was in reality, when it came to replacing their Atto 3’s battery under Australian Consumer Law, as they are entitled to:
It took almost 3 months to replace the battery. But there’s an even more interesting twist to this story.
Watch the full video to find out what happened when BYD actually replaced the battery…
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