Your Car's Warranty
Tuning products cannot invalidate your car’s warranty. That is the law.
It is a common misconception that purchasing aftermarket and tuning products like sports exhausts and engine upgrades invalidate a car’s warranty. However, that just simply isn’t true.
Since the European Commission passed its new ‘Block Exemption Regulations’ in June 2010, it has become illegal for any dealership in the EU to invalidate a warranty as a result of a modification to the car. This legislation was brought about to help provide competition in the marketplace for repair and maintenance in the automotive industry and will remain in place until at least May 2023.
In the United States, there is similar consumer protection through legislation relating to the more general provision of warranties, under the ‘Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act’ of 1975.
UK/Europe
European Commission Motor Vehicle Block Exemption Regulation (2002, Revised 1st June 2010)
USA
Magnuson-Moss Warranty - Federal Trade Commission Improvement Act of 1975
What this means for you
This legislation means that you are actually free to modify your car as you wish.
Before this legislation came into effect, dealers were using restrictive warranty conditions to force owners to use official service and official manufacture parts to maintain their cars and to wrongfully deny warranty coverage.
Block Exemption law was therefore introduced to stop this uncompetitive practice. Without this legislation, owners faced the wholly unreasonable situation where they may buy non-manufacturer parts and the dealers could invalidate the warranty/cancel the service plan on the entire car, or (wrongfully) deny warranty coverage on a completely unrelated area to the non-manufacture part.
Therefore, no dealer is permitted to threaten to invalidate OR actually invalidate a warranty on your car if you do not use Official/Authorised aftersales services or if you do not use parts supplied by the dealer or original manufacturer. If a member of staff at your dealership says otherwise, they are breaking the law.
Scuderia’s Warranty Guarantees and Promises
As well as Block Exemption law, Scuderia Car Parts Ltd provides additional, all-encompassing protection to its tuning product customers:
- When you replace an Original Part with one of our Tuning Products, it is only natural that the manufacturer is unable to warrant the replacement item (as it’s no longer their own). Here, Scuderia Car Parts promises to warrant that replacement part ourselves.
- Secondly, in the extremely unlikely event that any parts we supply and fit are proven to be responsible for a problem, then we (Scuderia Car Parts Ltd) warrant both the part AND the problem so that neither yourself nor your dealership are responsible for correcting a fault traced back to our products.*
In providing these dual guarantees, we reassure the owner, as well as allaying the concerns of both the dealership and the manufacturer, so that they know they will not be required to warrant a part or problem caused by one of our products. Our scale, experience and choice of the very best tuning products, together with working alongside countless main dealers gives us the ability to provide this complete protection to every one of our customers.
The vast majority of Scuderia’s work is completed on cars which are under manufacturer or extended warranty and it is worth pointing out that we have NEVER had a warranty invalidated on a customer’s car since the company was founded in 2002.
*Subject to terms and conditions.
Block Exemption Regulations Explained
'Block Exemption Regulations 1400/2002' (in short 'BER') state that a warranty is not invalidated where: