Dinantronics Elite a scam?
 

There was a thread on here earlier with a similar situation and Dinan moved to a completely different state and that was the reason for the delay for a fellow member.

Did you by the Dinan from them directly or from a shop/vendor? You might be able to get a refund from a vendor. Did you try to see if one of their authorized installers could look at it to make sure everything is ok?

They definitely aren’t a scam company, I, along with many other members have had or have their systems. They just seem to be in some sort of transition as a company and aren’t doing a good job of it.

My Elite produces lots of extra power and torque. They do seem to have a problem getting back to people quickly. Although I did have a question up something and they were back to me quickly.

They clearly have some major QC problems with whatever Chinese company is making the tuning boxes for them. There are a lot of people reporting failed units.

Where is that? Can you link to those instances? I've only seen one or two issues posted on NAM.

Hard to imagine that Dinan has become a "scam" company. One would assume that they will make things right if the unit is defective.

They are going through a transition and a geographic move, as others have noted.

Back in 2017 they were extremely responsive to my many inquiries. And my Dinan Sport has, other than funky blue tooth connectivity, thus far been issue free and certainly delivers added boost as promised.

Dinan is undergoing a complete consolidation of the business. The HQ in California is being moved into APR tuning's headquarters. I would assume a large portion of Dinan's employees are gone and APR will be taking up the slack or developing new products for mini/bmw.

I'm going to assume that OP has gotten with warranty and whatever course of corrective action needed to be done is well on its way. If not, please let me know.

In general, I apologize to everyone for not being around much (or at all really) for the past month or 2. Have had a lot of transition going on and forum stuff was pushed to the back burner on my plate. So I have been derelict in my duties and will try and be around a bit more now. That said there is still a lot of things still in transition mode so please be patient. Direct messages will still get quicker responses since I get those notifications directly.

As other have said though Dinan has relocated to Alabama from the Bay Area and now share a campus with APR (VW/Audi Tuners). We are still independent companies and function as such with a few shared resources (HR, Shipping, etc). Engineering, marketing, sales, warranty and all the bigger departments are independent from one another. Although, we now can bounce ideas off one another and save ourselves a bit of time if ideas work for both entities. In the long run it will be very prosperous for both companies and also at the end of the day, the consumer.

Short term... its been painful but we are finally starting to turn a corner and things are normalizing again. Our biggest challenge beside the physical move has been in the production side of things. We essentially started from scratch in the staff for that department and had to retrain from the ground up. There are a lot of processes and nuances to things here at Dinan in the VERY diverse catalog we have so the learning curve has been steep.

It should also be noted that we now have a bigger warranty/tech support staff then we have ever had in the history of the company complete with a group of guys that have proven to be very good in the limited time they have been here. So, please feel free to reach out to them if anyone has any issues. They are very responsive and typically will get back to you within an hour or 2 if you don't get someone right away.

Glad you're finally getting settled in at your new location.

Appreciate it guys. Alabama is... different. But, we live like kings out here compared to CA so that's good. =)

@Dinan, any updates on timing of software for the Elite?

Software? All Elite variants for current generation MINI's have been released so I am not quite sure what you are referring to.

The apps maybe? I have heard next to nothing recently on app development. There was some scrambling when we first got here to update some of the current apps (SPORT and the BMW ELITE) for some compatible issues with the newer phones that arose but that's the extent I have on anything app related.

I was thinking of an app. As I recall ECS tuning made mention of it on the website when I bought the unit.

Thank you for responding. I will admit I was very discouraged and disappointed with the experience both in ordering process, issue resolution after installation, and now RMA. This was the most exciting piece I was looking forward to add to my Mini, which I am sure added to the disappointment.

It took me about a week to get ahold of them and now another week for them to get my shipping address correct. I still have not been provided a shipping label. But I am guessing since it was late in the day I will see it tomorrow. The funny thing is I sent 4 different emails to the support@dinancars.com and the warranty specialist I was working with said he never saw them, which might be an IT glitch caused by inbound mail size limits on the Exchange or what ever mail server is used since I was told to send photos since we had problems finding the unit I registered (although I was able to pull it up fine on the website).

I am just hoping that the end result once I finally get the new Dinantronics Elite will be worth the wait. If you could send the new one a little hotter to compensate for the larger FMIC I wouldn't mind.

Talked to Gary this morning (the warranty guy you are dealing with) and he will send out the shipping label this morning. He's just waiting on shipping to get him an updated one. support@dinancars.com is not a valid email address--- should be techsupport@dinancars.com so that probably wasn't helping matters any. =)

Regardless, you should be back up and running with a tuned car in the near term it sounds like.

That would definitely be the problem. I guess there was confusion when he gave me the address. Hopefully I can get it out today and the turnaround time isn't too bad.

Back in early email times I set up my email server to forward any emails that had the correct @xxxx to my computer. so anything @dinancars.com should be going directly to someone who cares. Whomever admins your server should be brought up to speed in race mode!

It's a sad and poor way to treat a customer. They screwed up multiple times, should have just sent you a new unit with a return label for your old one.

I've got two Dinan products, might be the last two I ever buy. I hate the screw ups and excuses routine, just fix the guys problem. You'll lose more sales from this kind of crap then anything else.

Getting restructured two times in 3 years is a big negative sign for the future of the company.