extended coverage
 

Hi all. I have a 98 with 31K on it. While haveing the 30K service done I inquired about an extended service agreement. I was told as I did not buy it at the local dealer I could not buy one. If I hade bought from them I could get a 100K one. What kind of game is this? Any one know where I can buy extended coverage ?

there are a number of after-market companies that offer extended warranties. Among them: CostGuard and Car Care Connection. There are a bunch more that I had come across when I was researching what extended service plan to get for mine, but I don't remember what they were. There is no stipulations on where you bought from or anything like that. If you have higher mileage, my impression is that the price of the extended plan went up significantly after your factory warranty expired, but that's not to say that you couldn't pay a bit more and buy it anyway.

I ran out of time not miles...

they offer time and miles
 

The extended warranty that these (and other) companies offer cover <both> time and miles... I was in the same boat; I was way under mileage wise, but wanted more 'years'. I bought an extended warranty that gave me another 3 years... now I'm looking at cancelling it so that I can put in 3.4 l engine, but they will give me back a pro-rated amount based on the amount of warranty time left... If you are interested, I can check (and share) the exact terms/cost of the warranty that I purchased back in April.

Mr engnr,
I am Interested. Thanks for takeing the time :-)

When I purchased the warranty, my vehicle had 14,889 miles on it. I was charged $1,750.00 for an additional 3 years of protection (or 36k miles). This was the 'premium' preotection which had a lower (but not the lowest) deductable ($200) and some other doo-dads.

Hope this helps

Be very careful about these companies. I just returned from my vacation and am in the process of catching up on my business related reading, i.e. Wall Street Journal, Business Week, etc. Somewhere in all that reading, just in the past week, was an article about one of these extended warranty companies that is in financial trouble. There were serious questions about whether the company could make good on its warranty obligations. Apparently this company is big in auto warranties and a major player in this business. I have seached high and low but can't find the article. I wish I could get you a name and a reference to the publication but I fear I pitched the publication after reading. If you know the name of the warranty company you could do a web search. You might also check the Wall Street Journal website for articles in the last 10 days about extended warranty companies.

Bingo!
Here are two recent articles from the Wall Street Journal.
9/17/03 "This Lemon is Certifable"
9/23/03 " When Your Car Warranty Runs Out of Gas"

The warranty company in trouble is National Warranty Risk Retention Group out of Lincoln, Neb. Apparently they are now in bankruptcy so it is unlikely they are still writing policies. If you read the articles you will see that this is somewhat of a fringe business and some of these companies are risky and poorly capitalized. You don't ever want to buy insurance - any kind - from a company that is not financially strong.

Thanks fore takeing the time but I said the hell with it ..... If it gives me any trouble I'll just get a new one :-)