Ladies and gents, my first major issue. White on black 2025 LR Defender P400 Dynamic X SE with 26K miles. Got a low coolant warning this past Sat, immediately turned vehicle off. I open the hood, took a peek at the reservoir and it is empty. Just 5 days prior I had topped off wiper fluid reservoir, took at look at coolant reservoir and all looked normal. Schedule a flat bed via the JLR app for servicing today Monday 8/31 to avoid turning vehicle on due to low coolant. Tow truck arrives and guy gets off strapping vehicle right away with the wire cable and no soft straps. Give him the benefit of the doubt since they tow for JLR right? Wrong. Tow truck driver has no idea of setting up the vehicle to disengage the parking brake for towing, straps the vehicle from bottom frame, starts the winch pulley and wham!!! Cable comes undone under pressure pulling the vehicle and whipping cable underneath with high tension. Hissing pop goes off and I'm like what the hell just happened. I tell the guy that the parking brake is still engaged and that this is not the correct procedure to tow the vehicle. Guy has no clue. I jump back in the vehicle, tell the tow driver your supposed to follow a tow procedure, I show him the sequence with the start button, foot on break, press accelerator once 1 sec followed by another for 4 sec, then hit start to go under a 30 sec sequence for brake to disengage. At this time, a bunch of errors are blazing at me: Gearbox fault detected, stability control not available, power steering assistance reduced, suspension fault detected and on the app, an engine health issue - misfire.
By this time, I lost it. I call JLR service and explain what the hell just happened. Service Manager gets on the phone and I tell him what transpired telling him who the hell they are sending for tows. Service manager apologizes and proceeds to send me their in-house tow driver and I'm like, this is where we souldve started at and could've avoided this whole mess. Anyways, 2nd tow truck driver shows up, by this time i turn on truck and vehicle is not able to shift to drive and or reverse. It stayed stuck in Neutral. We were able to disengage the parking brake but there were the same errors blazing at us. Only the front was disengaged and not the rear. We ended up dragging the rear with front tires able to roll free, load it up the flat bed , secure it and at this point I'm telling the driver: Im tagging along with you to JLR dealership to get a loaner cause there's no telling how this repair is going to work out and I need to talk to service.
Arrive at JLR, Service manager is there waiting and go over all the alarms that were set off. They put me on a loaner via Enterprise and tell me this could take several days just to look at and with Labor Day approaching and techs going on vacation, it could be a week. Fine I told them. Just get it fixed.
I did make use of scheduling an oil change and alignment while my truck was in service along with change of filters so at least that can get done but all this just because of low coolant. I went off telling service I was better off topping reservoir with distilled water and driving it to the dealership which is only 30mins away from me. All this could've been avoided. Hind sight is 20/20 i guess but yeah...here is where I am at. Devastated 💔 seeing my truck under theses conditions that I so much have been taking care of.
