Nick Murray saved for five years to buy his dream car, a special ordered 2013 Porsche 911 Carrera S with thousands of dollars of customizations. He posted a proud video of his new toy on YouTube for all to see.
His next videos weren't quite so triumphant. First he had four warrantied repairs, then the computer started resetting whenever he hit a significant bump, he also experienced weird smells in the cabin. He filed for Lemon law protection and was contact by Porsche of North America, but the fix offered didn't actually fix his problems. After he continued to have problems with the car, he entered into arbitration with Porsche. The company refused to give him a new car to the same specification or to pay him back the initial purchase price, insisting on giving him a portion based on the current milage of the car, so Murray turned to YouTube once more.
800,000 views of awful, awful publicity for Porsche later he was contacted and said "Good news! I have been contacted by PCNA to settle this. This whole mess will end today hopefully. Good that they are doing the right thing. Good for them." Later he said the situation was resolved in the following statement:
"The video is still up but I have put I note on it that this is resolved. I think I will leave the video up and point people to a new video to talk about what happened.
In the end TV and Radio were wanting to get involved as well and it had frankly gotten a lot bigger than I had ever expected so I was glad to get the call.
PCNA were offering me what they thought I would get a arbertation which is the standard offer for these sorts of cases, where as my position was that I felt what I had been through was more than just a standard case and wanted a full refund or replacement.
People can decide themselves if they agree or not. I can certainly see PCNA point of view and I hope they could see mine. The difference between what was offered and what I wanted was just a few thousand dollars. It certainly was not worth the mess that this all turned into sadly.
Anyway they have not bribed me or asked me take down the video or anything and because they came to the party and I do still believe in their product I am happy to make a new video saying so.
Also to thank everyone (you guys/ladies in particular) for all your support.I did not want to damage the brand, and I think I need to help people understand that my case was pretty much a one off. Too much hate has been thrown at Porsche for the wrong reasons here and I would like to do what I can to fix that. Their product is good, I just had a disagreement with them over how serious my particular case was. That has been fixed now and I can move on to a new car."
This just goes to show that the internet has made it possible for a consumer who got screwed over to cause a big enough stir to force a company's hand.
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[via Autoblog]
