19 Sep 06
A year with a Lexus promised many things: excellent customer service, peerless reliability and an anodyne driving experience. After 12 months and almost 10,000 miles behind the wheel of a black GS300 SE-L, I've been forced to rethink my view of Lexus - mostly, but not entirely, in a more positive direction.
The first preconception was that I'd get excellent customer service. Lexus always does brilliantly in JD Power customer surveys and this brings with it a weight of expectation. I'm a stickler for good service and I'd expected great things of a brand that's still battling to establish itself in the UK market.
Park Lane Lexus in London was my local dealer and our initial relations were excellent. When a tyre valve was damaged in an altercation with a service station compressor, Park Lane was quick to achieve a makeshift solution. Polite, courteous and professional, the staff seemed to take pride in their work, which is not true of everyone in the motor trade.
But over the course of the year, I became less and less satisfied with their service. Phone calls went unreturned, requests to fix the problematic radio reception were ignored and they claimed to be unaware of a means of turning up the volume of the phone system, even though Lexus HQ knew of a fix.
I was also infuriated to discover, when the car returned from Park Lane, that the staff had retuned the radio and turned up the bass to the maximum. I wondered what they'd been doing with the car and it was enough to make me worry that the slick presentational skill of the customer-facing staff was something of a veneer.
Park Lane still provided a level of service far in excess of that I've experienced from Mercedes dealers, but failed to deliver the excellence I'd expected. They were good, but not that good.
