MG4 not charging

[tsedge]

I very much doubt the ECU cost is a major concern. It probably costs MG much less than you think



As I said before, there needs to be a law change to protect consumers and improve dealer and manufacturer quality. e.g. In the first 3 years of ownership, if the car is not usable for more than 7 days, a courtesy car must be provided, if none are available, then a hire car is provided.

This needs to be made consumer law.

CCU replacement cost I believe is £1800. It is expensive and/or may be labour intensive to change.

If there were such a law, either cars or servicing would just be more expensive to offset the costs.

 

[DixieTGS]

I agree, but there may be some benefits, e.g. a garage may choose to pay overtime rates to get the job done a day or 2 earlier. They get to save on a day or 2 of hire costs and we would get our cars back earlier.

 

[tsedge]

I agree, but there may be some benefits, e.g. a garage may choose to pay overtime rates to get the job done a day or 2 earlier. They get to save on a day or 2 of hire costs and we would get our cars back earlier.

Yes, it may be a worthwhile tradeoff to improve the customer experience.

I still think the manufacturer direct model (ie no franchised dealers), like Tesla, makes most sense for improving the customer experience but I do recognise it has tradeoffs such as far fewer service centres, impersonal service and nobody local to pay a visit to.

 

[DavecUK]

I think you meant the CCU (combined charging unit) and not ECU (electronic control unit)?

Is @siteguru on holiday? ?

I did and have edited the post to avoid confusion. Even though I was referring to a quote about the CCU.

 

[DavecUK]

CCU replacement cost I believe is £1800. It is expensive and/or may be labour intensive to change.

If there were such a law, either cars or servicing would just be more expensive to offset the costs.

The work time for replacement is quite short (I was told). Warranty work is covered at a lower worker pay rate as well. As for the CCU, if it cost remotely near £1500, think how much the car would cost to build and hence it's ultimate retail. I seriously doubt it costs SAIC more than £100 for the actual unit itself.

A little story here...a mates Renault 5 (I think it was) electric window failed, I removed the door card and a cheap bit of plastic in the mechanism had snapped (a place you would have had to be braindead to fit plastic). I learnt his drivers side window had gone before and it cost him £550 to fix for exactly the same problem (this was 17 years ago). I went to the Renault garage with him, could we buy the plastic part, reply, no, we had to buy the entire mechanism. How much was the mechanism £400+VAT. We went to Camberly auto factors and the non trade price for a non OEM mechanism was £35, even more interesting was that this mechanism had no, plastic part that was a common point of failure in the OEM part.

So nah, that CCU doesn't cost SAIC anywhere near as much as you think.

On the second point, I don't believe that would be the case. Cars didn't get cheaper when they stopped supplying a spare tyre. Electric windows all round were actually cheaper than front electric/rear manual, didn't stop them charging more for electric windows all round. They will always rinse us for as much as they can. Having a law passed as I suggested will have the effect of making cars more reliable, having better spares availability and ultimately giving us some consumer rights when purchasing a car...and we have very substandard rights at the moment.

 

[siteguru]

Is @siteguru on holiday? ?

Siteguru was watching the footy, then making dinner, then drinking beer. ??

 

[tsedge]

The work time for replacement is quite short (I was told). Warranty work is covered at a lower worker pay rate as well. As for the CCU, if it cost remotely near £1500, think how much the car would cost to build and hence it's ultimate retail. I seriously doubt it costs SAIC more than £100 for the actual unit itself.

A little story here...a mates Renault 5 (I think it was) electric window failed, I removed the door card and a cheap bit of plastic in the mechanism had snapped (a place you would have had to be braindead to fit plastic). I learnt his drivers side window had gone before and it cost him £550 to fix for exactly the same problem (this was 17 years ago). I went to the Renault garage with him, could we buy the plastic part, reply, no, we had to buy the entire mechanism. How much was the mechanism £400+VAT. We went to Camberly auto factors and the non trade price for a non OEM mechanism was £35, even more interesting was that this mechanism had no, plastic part that was a common point of failure in the OEM part.

So nah, that CCU doesn't cost SAIC anywhere near as much as you think.

On the second point, I don't believe that would be the case. Cars didn't get cheaper when they stopped supplying a spare tyre. Electric windows all round were actually cheaper than front electric/rear manual, didn't stop them charging more for electric windows all round. They will always rinse us for as much as they can. Having a law passed as I suggested will have the effect of making cars more reliable, having better spares availability and ultimately giving us some consumer rights when purchasing a car...and we have very substandard rights at the moment.

This is just speculation. Obviously the true cost to the manufacturer (not SAIC incidentally) is less but we don't know what the real costs are and analogies with windows are spurious.

As for "they always rinse us", it is strange how so many car companies have gone bust and lost money over the years. If it were really true everyone would want to be in car making instead of (for example) banking. It's a tired and worn out trope. It is something of a miracle that tens of thousands of assembled parts work well together, last and make a decent vehicle for only a few tens of thousands of pounds.

And we actually have a lot of consumer rights but people rarely know about them or make use of them.

 

[DavecUK]

This is just speculation. Obviously the true cost to the manufacturer (not SAIC incidentally) is less but we don't know what the real costs are and analogies with windows are spurious.

I do consultancy for manufacturing and the costs of components to the factories are much less than people would ever guess. From the end price quoted for the fix I can have a pretty accurate guess at what this part really costs.

My dad spent his life after WW2 in the motor trade, so I got a lot of exposure to what went on. Many car companies have gone bust or lost money, however the reason is rarely if ever that they have undercharged consumers for the product (except for one situation). In fact sometimes the opposite is true! Usually it's because the cars have been:

• Unreliable
• rust boxes
• bad reputation (economy, fixability, servicing, design etc..)
• Dealers dumping them because they are not appealing

The one instance where manufacturers go bust through not charging enough, is when their build methods, logistics, design, workforce etc.. is so poor that they needed to charge much more for a car that's worth much less.

As for the laws that protect us, for the value of the product they are extremely limited, we don't even have a lemon law as they do in the US. My BMW i3 range extender had £12 of warranty work in under 3 years, with 2 more common failures yet to happen...the charge unit and capacitors and the REME fault (the combined cost of both being around £12). I had to sell it as it was worthless as a 2013 model in a private sale due to the reputation of that model year. Fortunately I PXed it to a dealer (and the REME fault finally came up on that trip then reset itself when the dealer went to inspect it! My issue with that was i had to buy another i3 to get them to agree the PX. Ultimately I had no protection and couldn't at any point reject the car as fault after fault came up. If you have ever had a major problem, you soon find there's very little in law to protect you, bad paint being another common issue on vehicles!

 

[siteguru]

The consumer protection in law is there ... the difficulty is in enforcing it, in terms of cost and time if the seller is intransigent.

 

[tsedge]

I do consultancy for manufacturing and the costs of components to the factories are much less than people would ever guess. From the end price quoted for the fix I can have a pretty accurate guess at what this part really costs.

My dad spent his life after WW2 in the motor trade, so I got a lot of exposure to what went on. Many car companies have gone bust or lost money, however the reason is rarely if ever that they have undercharged consumers for the product (except for one situation). In fact sometimes the opposite is true! Usually it's because the cars have been:

• Unreliable
• rust boxes
• bad reputation (economy, fixability, servicing, design etc..)
• Dealers dumping them because they are not appealing

The one instance where manufacturers go bust through not charging enough, is when their build methods, logistics, design, workforce etc.. is so poor that they needed to charge much more for a car that's worth much less.

As for the laws that protect us, for the value of the product they are extremely limited, we don't even have a lemon law as they do in the US. My BMW i3 range extender had £12 of warranty work in under 3 years, with 2 more common failures yet to happen...the charge unit and capacitors and the REME fault (the combined cost of both being around £12). I had to sell it as it was worthless as a 2013 model in a private sale due to the reputation of that model year. Fortunately I PXed it to a dealer (and the REME fault finally came up on that trip then reset itself when the dealer went to inspect it! My issue with that was i had to buy another i3 to get them to agree the PX. Ultimately I had no protection and couldn't at any point reject the car as fault after fault came up. If you have ever had a major problem, you soon find there's very little in law to protect you, bad paint being another common issue on vehicles!

Thanks for explaining your background and expanding on your point of view.

I'm not disagreeing with you that the true parts cost is much lower, but also there are a ton of other costs such as shipping, import duty and labour to fit and all the general costs of doing business that have to be factored in. Viewing a car merely as a collection of parts is a bit like viewing a home as a collection of bricks, mortar, plasterboard, plaster and paint.

Unless there's a monopoly car maker (which there isn't), it isn't a rigged market, so if it was as easy as you say to offer cheaper cars, someone would be already doing it. With MG we are already in that low-cost segment, so arguably that's why most of us are here already.

All rights involve costs and so we could certainly have much stronger consumer rights - eg free guaranteed courtesy car for up to 12 months, right to reject for no reason if there are more than 3 warranty claims in a 12 month period, 10 year or lifetime warranties, compensation for more than 7 days without the car etc.... - but all that would happen is that these costs would be loaded onto the new car prices, finance rates, parts prices and servicing and maintenance costs.

So would that better if everyone had much higher costs for motoring? Not everyone would agree, I suggest.

 

[NickT]

So I got the car back last Friday! We picked it up and immediately set off for the Highlands over May bank holiday weekend. It charged fine over the 4 days and has been fine since. It’s so nice to drive again ?. One clear difference is that beforehand there was always a bit of a dance around getting it to charge, with it being temperamental and if we opened the door while it was on charge then it would not charge again until it was disconnected. So now when it behaves basically as I would expect it to, I can see that there was always a problem right from the start and it wasn’t us just being newbies (well not all the time anyway!). As mentioned before they replaced the CCU, which didn’t solve it, then they replaced the charging port. Which seems to have done it. They said they think that it was the charging port all along and maybe that is causing the general CCU problem. But that may have just been chat.

 

[NickT]

Just an update on this, in case anyone is interested…

Had no problems since the fix. We have driven from Scotland to holiday for two weeks in North Spain (via the Santander ferry), fully loaded with 2 kids. Had no problems with the car and charging had been easy. In fact was a great experience, stopping every 2 hours to charge and have a 30-40 minute or so rest on the way to Portsmouth was much more relaxing than gunning it in the old petrol car! The adaptive cruise control eases the strain nicely. We've also now added a tow bar, so we can take the bikes next year.

Also to add that to charge in Spain was a maximum €0.45 euros for the rapid charges, half the price of England's rapid charges we had to use. There are also loads of chargers. Oviedo where we stayed also had free on-street parking if you had an electric car. Which was pretty handy as a tourist, meant we didn’t have to decipher the parking zone rules!

 

[Rolfe]

That's great news.

 

[Elinor 123]

My mg4 is 6 months old , after trying various ways to charge no difference , it charges for 5 mins then shuts off , also the range has been getting lower each time it charges, its gone back to the dealer this morning , they tried to charge it on 22kW and no difference , so now i wait , they think it needs a CPU update ? Personally I think its got a failure somewhere ?

 

[ReintjeWA]

My mg4 is 6 months old , after trying various ways to charge no difference , it charges for 5 mins then shuts off , also the range has been getting lower each time it charges, its gone back to the dealer this morning , they tried to charge it on 22kw and no difference , so now i wait , they think it needs a cpu update ? personally i think its got a fail somewhere ?

CPU or CCU? CCU is a known fault on certain older models, but I believe that fault is normally fixed by replacing the CCU entirely.

 

[Tight Git]

My mg4 is 6 months old , after trying various ways to charge no difference , it charges for 5 mins then shuts off , also the range has been getting lower each time it charges, its gone back to the dealer this morning , they tried to charge it on 22kW and no difference , so now i wait , they think it needs a CPU update ? Personally I think its got a failure somewhere ?

Although you say it's 6 months old I guess it hasn't got the rear wiper and is the long range model?

If that is correct it will be another CCU failure which the dealer will replace.