Quoted message said:"Our warranty is extended to the original owner only. We offer a
lifetime warranty for those who make the investment with an authorized
Seven dealer to purchase a Seven. You made no investment with an
authorized dealer or with Seven Cycles and you are riding a frame that
was not designed or built for you. We do not extend the frame warranty
to second owners because we cannot guarantee the frame will be used in
the same manner as it was intended."
Quoted message said:Is this a whitewash or what? Can't guarantee the frame was used in the
manner intended??? It's a bike frame. I rode it. What do they think I
did, hammered railroad spikes with it? And as far as the "investment"
part of it, the person I bought it from only sold it so that he could
buy a fully custom Seven. So they still sold two frames.
I'm not sure why Seven worded things the way they did; it's as if they're
intentionally trying to put people off who didn't buy them new.
The reality is that warranty coverage is an expensive thing for a
manufacturer to offer, and raises the price of the product. The original
purchaser of a particular product, at the time of purchase, probably isn't
thinking at that time about selling it to someone else, so offering a
more-expensive warranty wouldn't significantly add to the perceived value.
And then there's the other problem about extending warranties past the
original purchaser. The seller won't always disclose the fact that the bike
had been in a serious accident, and the buyer will sometimes try to make a
warranty claim, saying they're the original owner, that it was never abused
etc. Honest, we've seen this happen. They got burned in a remote (ebay
sometimes) transaction, and expect someone else to pay for it. You can
generally smell this sort of thing pretty quickly, and running the serial
number through the manufacturer verifies they aren't the original buyers.
And, finally, a "lifetime" warranty doesn't mean a product is going to last
forever. A useful design life takes many things into account, including the
inevitable compromise between durability and performance. A warranty limited
to the original purchaser is a way of offering reasonable protection to the
original purchaser, without the need to over-engineer something so
drastically that it would be heavier than need be for the vast majority of
users. To those few (original owners) who do, in fact, put zillions of mile
on their bikes, push them beyond their limits and ultimately cause them to
fail (without abusing them, of course)... they will receive the benefit of
getting a new or repaired frame for as long as they live, even though it may
be unreasonable to expect a given frame to last forever under hard use.
There are very few such people, so manufacturers don't worry much about the
cost of taking care of them, plus they likely become their best
advertisement (since apparently they like it so much they won't part with it
and buy something new).
--Mike-- Chain Reaction Bicycles
www.ChainReactionBicycles.com
