I know that this forum is filled with Heartland apologists. I'm not one of them. My 2014 Bighorn had almost 30 issues which, eventually Heartland fixed. Most of my problems were with the dealer's slow schedule. Now we are starting our third season with our Bighorn.
The good news
The quality of materials used to build our trailer is excellent. As a result, once the defects were corrected, everything is quite good.
The bad news
Heartland admits that almost 100% of their products need warranty work. The reason is pretty obvious: The "paid-by-the-piece" workforce has no pride in their work and simply does the least they can do to get past the pathetic inspections that Heartland QA performs. Of the 30 problems we had, all but two (Dometic AC's had a bad board...both replaced) would have been easy to catch if Heartland cared enough to carefully inspect before shipping.
Customer service is great. Know why? They get lots of practice. I think it's true that all RV companies in Indiana have the same problem. All companies owned by Thor Industries (Heartland is one) are driven by Thor to maximize profits. If it is cheaper to deliver defect-ridden trailers and fix them later, then that's what Heartland does.
Here's the secret: Heartland pays its fabricators by the "piece"; so many dollars per operation completed. This gives them a fixed hourly rate since if something takes longer to do, it's on the worker's dime. The incentive is to get as many "pieces" done as possible per hour. Quality is involved, of course. But not nearly enough. They pay inspectors by the hour. Now if the inspectors got paid per defect found, how many bad trailers would leave the plant? My guess is almost none.
Normally, warranty work is very expensive for the factory. But Heartland (according to my dealer) only allows the same amount of time that the factory takes to install the item when a fix is needed. In addition, Heartland pays a very low hourly rate to the dealer. That makes dealers less-than-thrilled to do warranty work, and the work they do they try to fit into Heartland's rate book. This is another incentive to do poor work.
Heartland does some simple math to decide how to handle quality. If the cost of creating defective trailers plus warranty work is lower than the cost of building higher quality trailers, they will choose the less expensive option. Since they build the cost of all these repairs into the wholesale price of the trailers, they can afford to be very nice and accommodating to us owners since we already paid for the "favors" they give us.
This may sound cynical, but it's how the business works.
