I get quite a few emails asking what I think of Panasonic washing machines. It’s a good question because Panasonic have a very respected reputation for brown goods. So people are naturally interested in their washing machines and wonder if they are just as good. I’m a fan of the Panasonic brown goods brand.
I currently have three of their products (a TV, a hard drive recorder, and a Blue-ray home cinema unit). I’ve also previously owned several of their VCR’s and cameras in the past and never had a single problem with any of them.
However, in the UK their washing machines were only launched in 2009, so there’s not much of a track record on white goods yet compared to other brands that have been making washing machines here since the 50s.
It’s highly likely they will be striving to carve an equally good reputation for white goods but white goods are completely different from brown goods.
Any new brand of washing machine has an uphill struggle to become established in an overcrowded market especially against names that have been producing white goods in the UK for many decades.
I can’t help feeling there are already too many washing machine brands to chose from (even though many are owned by the same handful of manufacturers) but I suppose there is always room for genuine innovation or better quality if that proves to be what’s on offer.
Panasonic seem to be pitched in the mid price range competing with the likes of LG or AEG so I would judge their washing machines against those brands and ask, what’s different about them? What are Panasonic offering that AEG and LG aren’t?
Which? have a lot of information about Panasonic washing machines which you should check out before buying.
Panasonic do have an excellent reputation on brown goods products so it would be crazy of them to produce sub standard white goods to sully their name. On the other hand, can we afford to just assume anything they make will be excellent?
Washing machines are very different to a TV, reliability is much harder to achieve because they are far more mechanical and have many moving parts.
If I turn it around and imagine what I’d think if AEG or Hoover started making TV’s it would seem pretty strange. LG made the transition well before Panasonic and sell both brown and white goods in the UK.
However, even after several years they are still very much a newcomer in white goods, and haven’t taken too much of the market from the old established white goods manufacturers.
At the end of the day moving to a completely new field of products such as moving from brown to white goods may take a good few years to get right.
After-sales service is important
An important aspect of selling white goods is a good supply of spare parts and technical information to the trade as well as a good quality after-sales network to cover the guarantee period. White goods, particularly washing machines break down much more often and need a lot more spare parts. Newcomers can take a long time to get these right, especially from a background of brown goods, and my sources tell me spares and technical information can be difficult to get for these brands.
Only time will tell, but after-sales is a vital consideration when buying appliances likely to require some repairs in the future unless you are happy to just get as long as you can out of something (with fingers crossed) and throw it away when it breaks down. My personal preference is to buy washing machines where the manufacturer have their own engineers in this country to repair them under guarantee. Panasonic are like all the brown goods brands in that they do not have their own engineers. They instead use third-party networks of repairers and this in my opinion is far less satisfactory.
Spares
Spares4Appliances is a spares company run by repair engineers who understand all about spare parts for appliances.
The letter conveys good intentions though if things don’t go well such a letter can be a little inappropriate and provoke an unintended reaction. I don’t know if 3 weeks waiting for a pcb is normal with Panasonic washing machines, all parts, especially ones not commonly used can sometimes have to be ordered and can take a few weeks to come through. However, Panasonic do seem to have a reputation for being difficult to get parts for.
You should have read my previous experiance regarding service and parts.
How a company like Panasonic can let this go on is beyond me
The only thing that customers can do is beware and show their thoughts with their refusal to buy
We do not know how many appliances Panasonic have actually sold in total, and we only ever hear about the faulty ones. I assume there are satisfied customers out there who, of course, we will never hear from. But these machines have started to appear on ebay as ‘spares or repair’, usually with an unrealistically high asking price. I have noticed quite a few with drum bearing failure. While bearings should be of a standard size, any seals are probably not. Has anyone had any success with these??
Hi Jake: I’m trying to be open minded about it, and not assume (as Terry D) said that several people complaining about something proves anything definitive.
But as I’ve said before in my original article, it’s beyond me why brown goods giants like Panasonic, with a fantastic reputation for quality, would want to become embroiled in white goods – especially washing machines – which are completely different in every way. Weight and size (for overseas shipping) is massive in comparison, reliability and aftersales are completely different and far more demanding and expensive to deal with. Plus the white goods product is totally un-sexy so to speak. People hate replacing them and they are usually a distress purchase. Then there’s the saturation in the market, with many well established washing machine brands well embedded in the UK. I don’t see the point in getting involved unless you are selling more reliable and longer lasting appliances. Simply selling very similar washing machines with the Panasonic name on isn’t good enough.
For a Panasonic washing machine to have the same respect as a Panasonic TV or DVD player it has got to be more reliable than Hoover, Hotpoint, Candy, Indesit, Bosch and AEG etc. and I don’t think they are. They are the same or less, so what is the advantage of the Panasonic name?
Just heard from the retailers that the broken machine is to be replaced with a new one on Friday. I hope the second one will have a better track record.
The new machine arrived a day early at the retailers request. The machine has now completed four washes. However the pipe that came with the new machine connecting the mains water to the back of the machine was faulty and leaked! Thank goodness we still had an old pipe that belonged to the Bosch Machine we had before purchasing the first (and last) Panasonic Washer.
Firstly, I don’t think it’s really that fair to imply that Panasonic are new to manufacturing washing machines as they have been making washers for decades in the far east and are a major player in that field out there. In fact, they probably have a lot more history than many established European brands. That aside, my further admiration of them is pretty limited but not due to their overall machine performance…
…almost a year ago we bought a NA-168VX2 from John Lewis and in fairness it has been working absolutely fine and still is apart from during the final spin it has become excessively noisy and has developed a clunking sort of banging noise which shakes the machine to the point that the detergent tray rattles badly inside its housing. Not the ultra quiet machine I had been lead believe. Consequently I raised a fault call with Panasonic.
Now the big problem with logging a fault call with Panasonic is that they sub out their repairs to a company called JTM, who, in turn, then sub it out to local independent repair men. The first time I logged a call with JTM they lost our details, which I found out after calling them back to chase it. Then the second call the engineer called us in the morning of the appointment as expected and said that he’d arrive between 1 and 5pm. That was the last that we heard of him and my wife wasted her time waiting in all afternoon without even a call from anyone. In our case the third party repair was to have been carried out by “0800 Repair” who apparently are a franchise and turn up in a yellow van with a giant screwdriver on its roof.
After all of that obviously my confidence in Panasonic’s warranty and support had rapidly hit rock bottom and the great idea of having a 6 year warranty with them felt like it’s not really worth the paper that it’s written on if any support isn’t actually going to be forthcoming. I work as a support engineer myself and in my field we work by SLA’s and response times, ie, a server outage may have a 20 minute response time. When domestic customer warranties don’t live by those sort of rules then you rely on them just being reliable and competent – which in my experience Panasonic’s support is neither.
After a series of phone calls kicking down doors at John Lewis by starting at their customer care call centre and ending with a director at their head office, they’re going to replace the machine and we’re going back to a Bosch. Although Bosch machines may not be perfect and it will cost me an extra £120 and will only have a 2 year warranty, at least I know that they’re reliable enough and provide a dependable in-house support service that can be counted on.
In summary, my experience has been that they make good machines which are let down badly by the backup of exceptionally poor if not non-existent support. Because of that, unless they up their warranty game significantly I would not consider either buying a Panasonic washing machine again or recommending them.
We used to do appliance repairs for D&G, Connect, N.E.S.N. and JTM Services, and I know who we used to have the most problems with. (See the last comment). I was once sent to the John Lewis store in Reading to look at a faulty Panasonic machine. But it was 6 miles away in their main distribution centre at Theale. So I went to Theale, diagnosed the problem and ordered a new door catch. The part took over 3 weeks to arrive.When I went to fit it I was informed that another repair company had turned up the day before, with the correct part, and the now repaired machine had gone back into store. I never did get paid for that ‘job’. Unfortunately my work college contracted cancer and died 6 months later. The company folded and all the above warranty companies lost one of their top agents. It appears, from quite a few of the comments that have gone before, that standards have slipped somewhat, and probably will continue to do so as more and more of us oldies reach retirement and disappear.
Hello Warranty, what warranty? I’ve only said they are new in the UK market. “In the UK their washing machines were only launched in 2009”. I expect their aftersales are much better in their native countries and the far east, but that counts for little here :)
Your summary pretty much paraphrases what I say in my article.
I am amused to see that a Panasonic washing machine has come out top in an energy efficiency test. I can only presume that all their down time is taken into account.