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February, 2024 - Extinguishing a smouldering problem

Before we go any farther, I want to to skip forward in the timeline to close off on this extinguisher matter (and if you don't want to read about yet another administrative wrangle with our dealer, please feel free to skip to the next page, where we recall the joyful surprise reveal of the Boxster).

A quick recap: back on our pickup day in Canada, we discovered that the fire extinguishers - options we had purchased with our builds - were missing. They had been removed by the logistics company or the shipping company. The reason why was unclear, since non-ED vehicles with the fire extinguishers specified were arriving in North America, extinguishers intact. Rumors abounded about why this only affected cars that had done ED. I even heard some rumor about Eastern European gangs removing and modifying extinguishers on cars that did Euro Delivery, which then later caused safety issues. Other equally strange reasons were forwarded.

Anyhow, the reason why didn't matter. The essence of the matter was this: we ordered and paid for an item as an option on our cars; that item was present during the entire execution of another order option (Euro Delivery), including at the second-to-last step: the drop off of our cars at the logistics point. Then, at some point during the final step of Euro Delivery (the shipping-home step) - which again, is part of the execution of an option offered on our builds by Porsche - the extinguishers were removed. Leading, of course, to two empty extinguisher trays upon receipt by us at final delivery at Porsche of London.

We indeed ordered these extinguishers on our builds. And paid for them. Price was actually quite reasonable.

As you may recall, Porsche of London did not want to remedy the missing extinguishers. They advanced the idea that the cars were considered "used", because we had driven them for more than x-number of kilometres during Euro Delivery. And because they considered our cars "used", they felt that absolved them of any obligation to get us replacements. We pushed back on this pretty firmly. It was to us a completely unacceptable position. Even if somehow in a strict legal sense the cars were used, it was only so because of the nature of Euro Delivery, not because they were *actually* cars on the used car market. It was a very thin, tenuous link to make, and felt very "excuse-y". We also strongly felt that this was an abdication of a basic responsibility: to give it your best effort to make things right for your customer when something in the supply line goes awry.

I'm using these fancy words now as I write this report. I used simpler terms and probably some hand-waving at the time; and after some discussion, they agreed to investigate and get back to us.

We didn't hear anything for a couple of weeks. Luke wanted to email Christina to ask what they had decided to do with respect to the extinguishers. I advised that we should wait. I felt we should demonstrate some patience. Porsche Centre London had a business to run. They had customers purchasing vehicles, getting servicing done, there were administrative tasks related to ordering, procurement... whatever. We understood all of that. We are not customers that demand to be put first, in front of everyone else. We did not want to be or to come across as impatient or unreasonable in any way.

So we decided to wait. Give lots of time for investigation, and for them to get back to us, as they said they would. Online, we did a little research of our own. We learned about processes at other dealerships with respect to fire extinguishers and ED. Apparently some dealerships warned about the possibility of losing the extinguishers in advance, some dealerships prevented choosing the option in the first place in conjunction with ED, etc. All reasonable courses of action that could have - perhaps should have - been done *by our dealer*. In retrospect, we should have foreseen possible trouble and done what we had learned some other Euro Delivery customers had done - simply put the extinguisher out of sight, behind or under the seats. The inspection is cursory and would likely not have spotted them.

An example of the little red bottles that caused so much trouble.

One month passed.

Two months passed.

Three months passed.

At this point, we started thinking about contacting them. What do you think, readers? Do you think four months was enough time for us to spend waiting for a resolution on our missing options?

We thought so, too.

We carefully crafted an email, which we sent out exactly on February 13, 2024 - four months to the day from when we picked our 718s at Porsche of London and noticed the missing extinguishers.

Luke Ward Feb 13, 2024 11:46 AM
to Steve, Tim, Christina,

On October 13 of last fall, we received the second (North American) delivery of our two 718 GTS 4.0 models from Porsche London. As pointed out by us at the time, our cars arrived without the optioned-in fire extinguishers.

It has now been four months and we have not had a resolution (or any communication about this at all). At this point, it feels to us as if Porsche London either has no particular interest in making this matter whole - or alternatively, has possibly simply forgotten about it.

Given the low value of the missing options, our sending of this email is more symbolic than anything else, and if you choose to not answer us or to not remedy this, we will not pursue this with you any further. But realize this: we're extremely disappointed that this hasn't been resolved.

...Luke and Andrew

You'll note that the tone is not happy. However, It wasn't mean, either. We clearly weren't pleased, though, and to be honest, we were feeling exasperated.

Within 90 minutes, we got an email from the general manager, Steve:

Hi guys. Thanks for the note and I hope you're both well and have had a chance to drive your 718's in this mild winter we've been having!

I'm sorry that we haven't been in communication regarding your extinguishers. I wasn't aware that Porsche Centre London was taking this on, as it is an issue that is completely outside of our control. From what I understood, it was customs that had the final say on those extinguishers. When you contacted the customs department, what was their response?

Thanks.

Steve

Point one: it was good that Steve responded quickly. That was appreciated. Point two: the "wasn't aware that Porsche Center London was taking this on" was rather frustrating, as we had our discussion about this directly in the dealership with Christina (and I believe at the end, with Tim). The most charitable explanation is that someone did not put this on a to-do list. Point three: again this idea that "it's not our fault" or "it's not our responsibility". We were very disappointed that this was being advanced as an apparent excuse to avoid incurring expense or effort.

I wasn't in any particular mood to be charitable. Probably within thirty seconds of reading that email, I was crafting a response. This response:

Andrew Lavigne Feb 13, 2024, 3:32PM
to Steve, Luke, Christina, Tim

Hi, Steve

Thanks for responding.

Yes, we are aware that the removal of the extinguishers were/are out of your control. We had a discussion about this verbally at the dealership in October and the general consensus was "we'll get back to you" (in retrospect, we should have obtained that in writing). We have since done extensive research and we have heard about a general directive from the VW group that fire extinguishers were to be removed from ED cars during transport. We have also learned that there are other North American dealerships that do in fact warn about or prevent this option combination.

However, that misses the point. This is the situation as we see it: we ordered and paid for an option that was available on the build sheet, in conjunction with the option of European Delivery. The configurator did not reject this combination; we were not otherwise told verbally or in writing that this was a configuration that could result in the non-delivery of a specified and accepted option. Had we had clarity about this, we would have adjusted by determining how we could ship the extinguishers ourselves, or alternatively not ordering the option at all.

Imagine another scenario: let's say we had ordered the 20" turbo wheel option and, for some reason, during transport, they were removed by a dock worker and replaced with some sort of inferior base wheels. Would we be responsible for that? Would we be responsible for tracking down what to do and how to rectify, even though "Porsche London was not responsible"?

We were not the ones importing/shipping cars into Canada and through customs. Porsche was. Or to whomever Porsche entrusted that job. How this situation could possibly be interpreted as a "it's your problem guys, and not ours to remedy", is baffling to the extreme, especially since we are talking about a marque such as Porsche. You are right about one thing: the removal was out of your control. However, the remedy is indeed within your control. In any case, if your position is simply that it is our job to attempt recompense from some shipping entity, then so be it. There's nothing further we can do to disabuse you of that notion.

...Andrew and Luke


The tone was obvious: I was unhappy. I didn't want to hear any more talk of "it's not our problem, guys". I wanted one of two responses: A "yes, we will handle it, good and valuable customers", or a "no, we will not do anything, you're on your own with this". I just wanted to know definitively. It wasn't worth our trouble to pursue this. I mean, let's get real here; These options were an extra $160 dollars on each of our builds. $160. That's it. Maybe the replacement bottles would be in the hundreds of dollars. But to make customers unhappy just to save such a piddlywinks amount of money, I mean... why? Were they running things at some razor-thin margin or something? Was it a "you're not the boss of me" sort of thing? I guess I could maybe understand reluctance if it meant the dealership would have to incur tens of thousands of dollars of cost, but... for this?

Clearly they understood my mood. A response came within an hour:

I understand your frustration with this situation. Unfortunately, this was the first time we encountered any issues with a euro delivery and an extinguisher.

That last thing I'd like to do is leave you two in a bad situation. All parties involved have come too far and worked too hard to make this entire experience possible and the last thing we want to do is tarnish the after sales experience. I'm sending you both a full refund for the option, which I'll get in the mail tomorrow. Outside of this option, I'm at a loss of what to do to get these back. I wish I could get you these extinguishers. I hope this helps. Thanks guys.

This was definitely a better response, although to be fair, they didn't mention whether or not they tried to achieve the best outcome, which would have been for them to come up with a pair of factory extinguisher replacements (I already knew that was a long shot, because for regulatory reasons beyond their control - and for which I had already spent time investigating - these were very hard to get in North America. But it would have been nice to at least see them try).

Anyway, it was a path forward. A reasonable one, given the circumstances.

Andrew Lavigne Feb 13, 2024, 4:41PM
to Steve, Luke, Christina, Tim

Thank you, Steve, for the prompt reply.

Thank you for sending a refund on the fire extinguisher options. I agree that it would be difficult to coordinate replacement bottles, since Porsche NA no longer stocks that item (my understanding is that this is due to some sort of new import restrictions). I/we will source some sort of aftermarket bottles myself/ourselves.

Thanks, ...Andrew

So, that was that. I then received an email from Christina, initiating the refund:

On Tue, Feb 13, 2024, 17:38 Christina Mandri wrote:
Hi All,

Our receptionist, Cloe, is currently getting these cheques into FedEx packets and hopefully reach you very soon! Apologies that these import restrictions caused a dilemma.

Warm Regards,

Good, good. The right thing was getting done, and now getting done promptly. I was slightly disappointed that we didn't get some variation of "Gee guys, we should have handled this better. We should be here to make things right when things go wrong, and we failed to do that. Our apologies".
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