Peugeot and Citroen has today announced a competitive five-year/unlimited-kilometre warranty for both local ranges.
The extended coverage, lifted from three-years/100,000km, will also apply to all model-year 2018 cars already sold in Australia. In addition to the standard PSA Groupe factory warranty of three years, the extended coverage comprises two additional years underwritten by PCA (Peugeot Citroen Australia).
PCA rolled out the new 5008 SUV last week with a five-year warranty, but that incentive was promotional only, and not originally intended to go beyond the few months immediately after the new model's local launch.
The longer warranty is transferrable to a new owner right up to the expiry date and is one of the key elements of Peugeot Prestige, a package including the extended warranty, roadside assistance and fixed-price servicing.
"When Peugeot and Citroën arrived in Australia – almost 80 and 100 years ago respectively, reliability and durability was the key to the brand's early success and today that focus has not changed," the Managing Director of PCA, Anouk Poelmann, was quoted as saying in a press release issued today.
"From design to engineering and manufacture, efforts at all levels of the business have focused on quality, durability and reliability – and this new five-year warranty underscores our confidence in the new-generation of Peugeot and Citroën product.
"Peugeot and Citroën are some of the oldest and most storied marques in Australia and we at PCA and Groupe PSA are determined to make the next chapter one full of confidence and growth."
During the media presentation for the 5008 last week, Ms Poelmann revealed that Peugeot recently scored a win in the UK, where Australian-delivered (right-hand drive) Peugeots are built.
"On the quality front, we are well below the industry for faults per hundred, in the UK. And these are the same cars built in the same factories... for Australia," Ms Poelmann told Australian journalists at the time.
The information to which she referred was compiled by JD Power in the UK last year. In another survey conducted in Germany four years ago, the 508 beat all its competitors in 'real-world fault data', based on a general vehicle inspection sampling of five million vehicles.
Peugeot and Citroen are promoting their quality and dependability so strongly in Australia due to the brands' troubled history of unreliability here – to say nothing of the cost of parts and a small dealer network for servicing. The new warranty is a sign that both the factory and the local distributor are willing to back the latest models, although not to quite the same degree as previous distributor Sime-Darby, the company that offered new Citroens with a six-year warranty...