Our new caravan !!

Awful situation for you, especially as this past year has played havoc with holidays generally. Hope things work out eventually, but I am with Pliers, and Tinny, it’s unacceptable.

I expect that unit is common to many vans and as you say swapping the the broken part is a relatively simple and quick job.

 Shocking that the problem was not spotted on the PDI.

We bought our (new, in 2019) Swift Challenger from them. There have been numerous problems (mostly minor) since then, all of which (so far) have been sorted. The PITA is having to make the 2 hour round trip every time something goes wrong, which equates to 4 hours total (dropping it off and picking it up). This of course isn’t the dealers fault, but it does make me wonder if I should have given more consideration to a Bailey, as the dealer is around 15 minutes from me. That said, in hindsight, I should have gone for a continental van, probably a Knaus, because my view is that British vans are rubbish, really.

Good luck J&S

Yet another update for the ones which have following this story, arrived home with said caravan on the Monday afternoon, Tuesday morning decided to have a play with it as we were going away Friday so wanted to familiarise myself with it but couldn’t get the fridge to turn on, apparently a well known fault with the PCB board (fridge brains). 

I was told to phone a Demetic engineer myself who talked me through it and confirmed it was faulty. Took Thursday off as annual leave to meet said engineer at Davan @ 10.00 he doesn’t turn up !! Got lad out of workshop to have a look he also confirmed pcb needs replacement but what they did was take another fridge with new upgraded pcb board out of a recently delivered van was told it was working went back down to Davan to pick it up got home and still doesn’t work although it now works on gas only. So was told to bring it back to Davan (5th visit there in 2 weeks) but we opted to cut our loses and hopefully tomorrow get our money back. 

By the way on the check sheet the section on “fridge electric operation” wasn’t ticked it was left blank !! also a new pcb board had already been ordered before I picked it up so someone knew it was faulty but still let us have it when it wasn’t fit for purpose. 

JnS, I’m surprised you've put up with this much hassle. Reject it formally in writing as per the Consumer Rights Act, grab the money and walk away. Davan have been playing you for a sucker😖

https://www.which.co.uk/consumer-rights/advice/what-do-i-do-if-i-have-a-faulty-product-aTTEK2g0YuEy

Thank you for highlighting another poor dealer to prospective buyers of common poor quality parts thrown together by cowboys in circuses masquerading as caravans.

As said earlier a decent dealer is paramount to ownership of a caravan.

There is a facsimile in that a commercial enterprise masquerading as a club won't support their punters/members in taking up such issues with their paymasters.

Funny old lark this caravanning thing 

 That's exactly what ALV at Tebay did with our Knaus.  In the first few months of ownership, there were two or three minor things that came to light that needed replacing - and quickly.  They obviously 'robbed' another van they had because the bits were posted off to me, arriving within a couple of days - for me to fit rather than have to undertake the 300 mile round trip to them.  When you've spent that sort of money - that's just what I would have expected them to do.

Our 2019 Swift Challenger has a crack in exactly the same place .Upholstery , drawer units and carpet were soaked , this was back in May .  Contacted our dealership ( near Huddersfield ) they told us to put Duct tape over the crack and carry on using it until they could get a replacement in October . 
Its been parked in our drive ever since unused whilst I have battled on a weekly basis to get them to actually answer my calls / emails . 
Mention of trading standards finally got their attention and it’s now booked in for next week for a replacement which apparently will take a week . 
We shall see .