vive Vive Cosmos - Warranty repair scam

[florider]

Hi Forum,

 

tl;dr: Vive is not following EU Warranty Law and claiming that perspiration has caused water dammage to the headset in just 7 months and thus wants to charge for the repair and charge to return the device without it.

 

After watching Linus' videos on Beat Saber, I thought to myself, what better way to get through the lockdown than to get a VR headset. Looking at which ones were available, I ended up going for the HTC Vive Cosmos.

 

Early October, the headset started to have issues, with the Vive Console app no longer recognising the headset. However, this was around the same time MSI released a BIOS update, so after I came back from visiting the family for 2 weeks, I tried to update the BIOS and it started working again. Little did I know, the problems would come back after a few more weeks - this time even reinstalling Steam VR and Vive Console didn't fix it. The cameras during the room setup no longer showed up, so I contacted Vive's chat support. They ran me through some diagnostics and ultimately asked me to send in my headset for repair.

 

A few days later, I hear back from a company called CTDI in Romania who are apparently the center performing the repair saying:

Quote

[...]

During the repair process our technicians have identified that the repair cannot be completed in warranty due to the following reason:
Liquid Damage- traces of liquid on the components of the device (oxide marks)

 

The cost of an out of warranty repair (spare parts + labour and logistic fee) vat included is: 149 EUR

 

Please note that if you reject the quotation you should pay the cost of inspection and logistic fee: 57.000 EUR

 

Parts lists:

• MAIN PCB - FRU,Main Board,HMD,GENERIC,English-WWE,USA,COMBO with FSY, MV - US SKU,Bootloader Lock,Generic Color,w/o SIM Lock,HORUS_HMD-C9

[...]

 

I was shocked. The headset has not been anywhere near water. My only explenation for this is that some sweat must've gotten into the headset, following a Beat Saber session. After replying to them that I was shocked by this, they provided some pictures - see 2 of them attached.

After pointing out that this must've happened through normal use, the support rep just aggressively replied:

Quote

Hello,

This in not covered by warranty, can be repaired now only if you will pay

 

 

So, I started to do some research and found out that this seems to be a common issue.

 

Warranty Policy change

It seems like this is something that HTC is clearly aware of, as their old warranty policy had a carve-out in for water dammage due to "perspiration". However, this has been removed (see point 7 under warranty limitations) in the latest Warranty Policy on the website.

There are countless posts on Reddit regarding the issue, [1, 2, 3] to name a few.

 

Support contacts

So I got in touch with @Vive_Care on Twitter, as many posts mentioned that they are a better team to get in touch with.

They quickly replied, asking me to move it to an email where they replied that they sadly couldn't help but had forwarded it to their EU counterpart.

 

The EU team got in touch the next morning with what was a clearly canned message:

Quote

Thank you for contacting HTC VIVE Support.
Thanks for getting in contact with the VIVE EU Email Support. My name is [...] and It's my pleasure to assist you.
Regarding your concern, please check the attached photos provided from CTDI RO, regarding the headset, please reply to the CTDI RO email with the acceptance or rejection of the fees, to proceed the repair process.

Have a nice day!

 

Other cases:

On Twitter, someone pointed me to another Youtuber, Sebastian Ang, who had gone through this entire saga with Vive in the past and was able to get it replaced after a prolonged fight with the support team and videos shaming HTC Vive publicly.

 

 

Now, as I don't have 50k followers on Youtube, I was wondering if anyone here has any advice on how to get HTC Vive to follow EU warranty law and repair the device under warranty.

 

In the meantime, based on this experience, I strongly suggest people avoid HTC Vive products - I know I will.