We have a warranty on a product for various reasons. But I rarely found any warranty useful because either the product never has any problems, or it develops problems soon after the warranty expires. The later happens quite a bit with phones and laptops for me. Not sure how. So I find it very amusing when a product actually fails before warranty and gets replaced with a new one because it was under warranty. That happened a few days ago and it was like that once in a lifetime feeling. Of course the cost of the product is so low that there is nothing really to celebrate, but it is still something.


Recently, the battery on our two wheel conked out. Normally I always start the scooter with the kick start the first thing in the morning (cold start). After that, anytime we use the scooter in the day, we use the auto-start. As a result, the battery is rarely ever in undue stress like it happens during a cold start cranking. Yet, one day, out of the blue, the starter switch made one crank noise and suddenly stopped working. I suspected battery and checked the voltage on it. Sure enough, it died on us.


The battery is not that old, so I was upset about it. We bought the battery on July 18, 2022. So it was about 2 years old. Normally, the life of vehicle batteries is 3-5 years if you take proper care. This one did not last anywhere near that range. So I checked the warranty card and noted the date as mentioned above. The day the battery failed was May 30, 2024. The warranty on the battery was 24 months + 24 months pro rata basis. What luck! The battery died just 20 days before the warranty expired! If the battery seller were to honor the warranty, ideally, they should just replace the battery. But somehow I was not very confident about it happening in real life.


We removed the battery from the scooter, because by now I have experience doing that work :). We went to the shop who sold the battery to us and asked for replacement. He said he will have to charge the battery overnight and check if the scooter alternator was working correctly before replacing the battery. The scooter alternator was working fine. He kept the battery to let it charge overnight and check the condition the next day. He reported that the battery has a fault and it needs to be sent to the factory where they will do more tests on it and if the battery is really at fault, the manufacturer will send us a replacement.


According to him, the whole procedure will take about 2 days. I was not sure if we will ever get it and was wondering if they will keep delaying the replacement until the warranty period is over then throw their hands up. Nothing like that happened. After 3-4 days, he called us and asked us to pick up the replacement battery. We got a brand new battery just like that! Although he claimed that the new battery will only carry the old battery warranty which expires in about 10 days. This is fine by me. At least I have a battery without paying anything out of the pocket. Of course the cost of the battery is less than Rs. 1000, so it is not like a big deal.


What I enjoyed about the experience was that the warranty actually worked in our favor for once. That too, so close to the warranty expiring. Although, this was not the first time. Earlier in 2016, a TV I purchased developed vertical lines all of a sudden before the warranty period of 2 years. I emailed support and while it took a long time, eventually it was resolved and I got a replacement TV. Although they replaced my TV with a used one and not a new TV, I was fine with it after the 3 month long back and forth with the support team. So warranty works but it takes time and perseverance.


Most of the times, my experience would be that the device fails after the warranty has expired, usually just few days or months after the expiry. I sometimes wonder if the electronics was so well designed that they fail right after warranty. Mrs. re-ynd has a theory that the device manufacturers, especially mobile phones, have a mechanism to trigger themselves to die after the expiry of warranty so that the owner will have to upgrade to a new device. But what about the reputation of the company? Well, they perhaps don’t care? The reason I buy some brand name companies like Sony, Samsung, Pioneer, Bosch etc is because of the trust in brand. Hopefully, they are not playing these cheap tricks :).