JamesH said:
Digressing a little bit off subject but after reading about all the caravans that leak, I must admit that I have never heard or read of any Carlight vans leaking.
Do Carlights leak like other manufactures vans?
If the number (percentage) is low it would point to QC of the mass produced vans.
Hello James,
If you review many of the threads on PC forum relating to caravans with water ingress, you will see that "poor QC" is certainly seen as one of the major contributors to this problem.
Whilst we only tend to read of those that fail, we must also accept that some caravans do not leak, which raises the question of why such wide variations occur. The fact that some caravans seem to remains perfectly dry, proves the technology and design are capable of working, so the inevitable conclusion that any reasonable person will make is the the manufacturer's quality control (consistency) is way less than satisfactory.
Historically most UK caravan manufacturers have a very seasonal build pattern, and to cope with such variability, they tend employ a lot of temporary labour when required. The results we get suggest that the training is less than perfect, and the incentive packages promote quantity over quality.
The car industry discovered over twenty years ago how inconsistent such a mix was and how vehicle quality suffered as a result. The solution was better training and a push to make quality (consistency) more important that quantity, by getting the work force to take responsibility for what they were producing and perhaps more importantly to understand the problems it causes when they let something less than satisfactory past their production stage is a major step in raising the quality of product.
The caravan manufacturers are not it seems prepared to join debates about quality, they certainly do not publish failure rates, so we are left to draw rather negative conclusions based on the evidence presented.
My last job before retiring was quality systems consultancy, and I can say with total honesty that companies that grasp the quality ethic and place a greater emphasis on total customer satisfaction, may face a little pain whilst they get their systems up to speed, but beyond the implementation phase, all companies were fitter and leaner with far greater customer satisfaction and consequently ultimately more profitable. This is a lesson the caravan industry needs to learn.
Echoing Damian's comment all UK caravan manufacturers have produced some caravans that leak, but don't go away with the idea that continental caravans are leak free - they definitely are not. Over the weekend I saw a Hobby caravan with a major leak problem.
If large numbers of one make of caravan are reported on forums, we can't really draw any conclusions about relative failure rates, unless we can proportion them against sales. We simply do not have access to the data to see if any manufacture is notably better or worse than the others.
Irrespective of what the actual failure rates may be, the consequences of a water ingress incident are major for each customer, and that is where companies with real customer focus would work very hard to resolve the problems amicably, rather than the adversarial process that customer often face.
Perhaps it's wrong to draw this conclusion but if water ingress was the small problem manufacturers seem to imply, they could afford to be more generous and forthcoming when resolving the incidents we do hear about.
. The lowest is 10 and the highest is 13, with an average of 12.
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