John Deere

In July, 2014, my husband, Fred and I walked into Evergreen for the first time. We had bought a 2 acre property the year before and our used riding lawn mower just wasn't working as well as we'd hoped.
We met with a salesman, told him about our property and he told us we'd come to the right place. After explaining to him that our property was on a hill with some steep slopes, he showed us a few mowers that he said would be best for us to choose from. We aren't wealthy, in fact, we were living off of one income at the time. We decided on the X300 with the blower attachment (so we could clear our driveway in the Winter). This was a huge purchase for us; an over $7000 purchase. John Deere has a reputation for being reliable and long lasting; we felt this was an investment.

Last August (2018), that riding John Deere mower started slowing down. We have completed all of the recommended maintenance on it. It seemed to lose power after only 10 minutes of mowing. Conveniently, our warranty was up the month before. We continued to mow our lawn in spurts...all 2 acres of it.

This spring, we knew we had to figure out another solution. Our 5 year old riding lawn mower wasn't working well. We called a repairman (as we do not live close to Evergreen, nor do we have a trailer to transport our mower to you). He took the transmission with him, called your service department and was told it likely needed replacement. Your service department suggested that he replace the transmission fluid to see if that would help.

He replaced the oil with high grade transmission fluid and put our X300 back together for us.

Guess what? It had zero impact. The mower lost power and was useless after 10 minutes.

I'm furious.

We trusted your salesman when he told us this mower was a perfect option for our property. We trusted him when he said that the John Deeres at Evergreen were higher quality than the mowers at Home Depot with the same name. We trusted that our riding lawn mower would last for years.

Now we find out that the transmission needs replacing after only 5 years (really after 4 since the mower slowed down last year). Now we find out that the replacement cost for the transmission is $1200.

Unbelievable. Our riding lawn mower has 183 hours on it. This is ridiculous.

A quick google search results in hundreds of upset X300 owners...all with the same transmission problems.
Surely there is something you can do to help us?

$1200 ( plus labour) is just not acceptable.