As DX100 has already pointed out, category N is non structural , ie cosmetic damage it means the car has had a very minor accident in the past that wouldn't affect it's safety integrity or roadworthiness. It will affect the price because it's registered and accident repaired, but as cars get older, this becomes less significant. All you can do is chalk this up to experience, you could have done what your buyer did and checked the car's HPI report when you bought it. Ultimately though if you've had the car for a while, had good use out of it then what did the category N status matter?, it's only an issue now when trying to sell but what i suggest is to put in the advert that the car is cat N, explain what this means and then you'll only get inquiries from people who (rightly) aren't bothered by this.

According to the OP the faults were not limited to the EM light. Are you involved in the motor trade in any way?

There's a difference in buying a car privately or at auction, and buying one from a retail seller, regardless of the price. buying from a dealer you have certain statutory rights as a consumer, and you pay a premium for the supposed benefit of buying from reputable source. An engine management light could be a minor problem, the issue here though is that the seller delivered the car with the light on, then dumped it and made a quick exit, that gives a fair idea of his attitude to customer service. If the engine management light came on while the car was in the process of being delivered, any reasonable seller would have told the buyer the light had come on and taken the car straight back to sort it, not done a runner and hoped the customer wouldn't notice.

That wasn't what i asked.

Of course you are, would you say it was reasonable or fair for the seller in this case to keep both the car and the majority of the buyer's money as well?

Are you one of them by any chance?

so you think the way the seller has behaved is entirely acceptable then?

I would respectfully disagree. Whilst the buyer paid well over the odds for this car, it's clearly worth more than it's scrap value, the bottom of the market will be underwritten by whatever the export price is for the l200 ATM, now that's not a market i follow, but i'd be astonished if it wasn't well above the scrap value. I'd agree that buying any older vehicle is a gamble, and i'd also agree that the buyer has been somewhat naive, even foolhardy in buying a vehicle unseen from this type of trader. you say to get a 'faultless' vehicle buy from a 'proper' dealer, which is a fair point, but in this case the buyer thought they were buying from a proper dealer with a good reputation. Now it may be obvious to those with more experience that this was clearly not the case, nevertheless, the buyer did set out to give this impression, his success in giving this impression may have depended on the gullibility of potential buyers, but that doesn't absolve the seller of responsibility. It's victim blaming to suggest it's the fault of the buyer to fail to notice the seller was dodgy, clearly the fault lies with the buyer for being dodgy, however obvious this is. This was presented as a retail sale, at full forecourt price, the very least you'd expect is for the car to have no major faults on delivery, and i'd class a bad oil leak as a major fault. you'd also expect the seller to respect your basic consumer rights, you certainly wouldn't expect the seller to take the car back on pretext of repairing it, then have them keep both the car and nearly £3K of your money.

I does sound like it, unfortunately when you get to cars of this value, you have to take into account what sort of profit margin the dealer is going to be taking out of it, and what sort of potential after sales service this can support realistically. the end result is when you get to the bottom of the market you've got the more arthur daley type retailers who are making money either from expensive finance options for people with poor credit ratings, or from essentially ripping people off by selling cars at the full retail mark up, but not giving the backup one would expect after paying the top whack forecourt price. I think there's an argument when you're in this price bracket for buying privately after doing some research into the type of car you want, you'll end up paying less, and you can put the money saved aside for the inevitable repairs and maintenance.

sounds like a problem with the DPF (diesel particulate filter), these are expensive to replace but you can i believe clean them, either with magic additives or by taking them off and cleaning the cartridge manually. as below https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv01BlfqXoY you've paid £1600 for an older car, i think in such circumstances one has to manage one's expectations as to what the car might be. Personally, i'd be inclined to steer clear of older diesel cars unless you have a good mechanical knowledge and are able to do some of the work yourself, though as modern cars become more complicated, doing any work yourself becomes more difficult. however, you've got the car now and need to make the best of it. I'd suggest getting a professional opinion on it, then do a bit of google research and find out what your options are to sort the problem in the most cost effective way. If the dealer won't fix an ABS sensor as a good will gesture i think they're unlikely to help you on this issue.

The buyer should indeed have studied the terms, there are a number of red flags in this advert and from this seller, most have already been mentioned, however, i was not suggesting that the buyer hadn't been foolish or naive in making the purchase, my point was that the seller is at least posing as a reputable dealer, clearly he isn't one, but nevertheless If one was buying a vehicle from a reputable dealer at full forecourt price, one might reasonable expect it to be fit for sale. the age of the vehicle is immaterial, it's entirely possible for a vehicle of this age and mileage to be reliable and mechanically sound, a relatively modern vehicle that's covered 116K is by no means worn out. reasonable wear and tear would be acceptable, major mechanical faults would not be, and would be reasonable grounds to reject the vehicle.

It's likely that it's covered by the garage's trade policy, if the OP has rejected it it would be part of their stock. garages and traders don't insure cars individually, they have bespoke insurance policies that cover all the cars in their stock as well as covering them to drive customers' cars if applicable.

The car is advertised as having relatively low warranted milage and is supposedly sold with no faults and 12 months mechanical warranty, so yes, it would be reasonable to expect it not to have major faults, because that's what the advert says, and the buyer is paying a considerable premium for this. If you bought this car privately or at auction then yea, you'd expect to take your chances, but you'd also expect to pay a lot less, this one is being sold at a considerable premium, on the back of giving the impression that the seller is a reputable dealer with a good reputation. to say the buyer should just suck it up is ridiculous. OP, i would suggest talking to trading standards about this. i would think the best outcome your neighbour could expect here is to get his car back and put the rest down to experience, effectively the dealer has stolen it from him, but i suspect the police would not see it that way. and you'd be left with pursuing a civil case. which if you won, you'd then have the problem of enforcing. with any civil case, the chance of recovery depends on what the person you're suing has to lose, if the seller has a proper business with a proper premises that it still in operation, then if one won one could send bailiffs round to enforce the judgement, if he's a fly by night operator posing as a proper dealer with nothing concrete to lose, then getting anything back might be more difficult. that said, he has the car, that is the property of your neighbour regardless of the £500 refund, if the dealer thinks he's owed that, he has to take the neighbour to court to get it back, he can't just take the car and keep it. i'd be looking to get the car back and let him argue the toss over the £500

You asked for advice, and the suggestion that you name the dealer was part of that advice. That's the problem with asking for advice, sometimes the advice isn't what you want to hear. the people on this forum are giving up their time to advise people for no advantage to themselves, but said advice will be objective, rather than tailored to your specific pre conceived views. when people give you advice in good faith that you have solicited, and you ignore said advice and say actually, i know better, what sort of response do you expect to get? There are two good reasons to name the dealer, one is that it will further you ends of getting a prompt refund, the other is that by putting the name in the public domain, anyone else who is considering purchasing a car from this company and who has the good sense to stick their name into a search engine before parting with the money would find this thread and be able to use this information to decide whether they wanted to go ahead with the purchase. The second aspect is possibly the more important, i would suggest that Bankfodder's impatience with you in this matter stems from the fact that you have come here expecting to be helped by volunteers who give their time for free, but are not willing to help others yourself by imparting information that could help them avoid the same situation that you find yourself in.

I had similar experiences with lloyds business banking in the 90's, both with the aggressive selling of useless health insurance add ons to my current account and with the insistence that i take out unsuitable payment protection insurance on a business loan

To update on what happened with this issue, we'd just about given up trying to get any sense out of either towergate insurance or the broker. In addition to this thread i had another advice thread running on the british farming forum, there were a large number of posts on that detailing the problems we'd had as well as posts from other people who'd also had difficulties with towergate. I noticed that towergate had an active account on twitter, and as a last resort i tweeted their twitter account with a link to that thread and asked if they had any comment on the disgraceful way they were treating their farming clients. Within 24 hours we'd been contacted by a senior claims handler, colin gave permission for me to speak to her on his behalf and it's taken about 6 weeks but we have negotiated a settlement with though it's still below what the market value of the machine is, is acceptable to my friends as they are able to keep the machine. I got a manitou expert to value the machine, he wrote a letter to say the export price, (ie the equivalent of bottom book trade price) was £4750, so pretty much the least the machine could be worth even if it was in very poor condition. they ended up offering £4000, with a £1200 reduction if they keep the machine + £50 excess, so basically they get £2750 to put towards repairing the machine, or we had a buyer for the machine for parts as is at £3K. so provided they keep the machine they can just about get out of it ok one way or another. It's not really ideal, given that it's taken 4 months and still hasn't been finalised yet, and that the offer is still below what our evidence suggests it should be, i think if it came to a dispute with the insurance ombudsman, given the evidence we have to support our case, ie an expert valuation, we'd win, but ultimately it's up to my friends, and they just want to move on from it, and i can't say i blame them, £2750 and keep the machine is still better than the original offer of £3K final settlement. They've also moved their farm buildings' insurance to another broker and saved over £1000, when the insurance for the tractors runs out they will change that as well. One question i would ask from the other posters on this site who may know more than me, is once we've accepted the offer, is it still possible to submit a complaint about the way the claim was handled by the broker? All i can add is whatever you do, don't have anything to do with wither towergate insurance, or R M Brown insurance TA Moneynotion.

I wouldn't, I'd make some small effort to find out if the parcel has been delivered back to the seller. Whilst the seller should have refunded straight away without the OP having to resort to a dispute through ebay, that doesn't absolve the OP from the responsibility of sending the goods back to the seller. The OP says that they had a message from the seller saying they hadn't received the item back from them some time ago, they should have done something to chase it up then, not simply ignored it because they've had their refund and can't be bothered any more.

Presumably you booked the return of the item on line? if so did you go to my hermes direct or use a forwarding service like parcel2go? assuming you booked on line you should have an email notification with the on line tracking info in it, or failing that, assuming you paid via pay pal for the delivery, try and trace the details via the pay pal payment page. as has been said, my hermes are not the best courier service, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that they have lost the item and the seller has not received it back. I would be astonished if even the standard service from My hermes did not have some basic tracking info available though

They insured it for what they paid for it, i think that possibly since they bought it the export value has risen, hence the 'bottom book' equivalent valuation is at least £5000, their machine is serviceable and useable but TBF not the tidiest, £5K is not an unreasonable valuation for it, it's what it would make if sold into the trade, to buy a similar machine from a dealer with a degree of comeback would cost a bit more, hence machines we'v seen advertised are around th 6 to 7 thousand mark, or more. I can't really see how the insurers can argue on one hand that it's underinsured and on the other say it's worth £2K less than they insured it for though. I do think that had they insured it for more, they'd have got the £5K, because i don't think the insurers have any idea what the machine is worth, they're just working on paying out a proportion, say 60%, of the sum insured. regardless of the actual value. I agree, going straight to towergate seems like the best option. what concerns me is that this man is doing similar things with his more vulnerable clients on a regular basis. i they issued a complain would it need to be directly to the broker or via towergate? Cheers

The assessor did ask what they thought the machine was worth, and the brothers said £5000 as this is what they had insured it for and what they had paid for it, though they had already seen that it was going to cost them more than that to buy a replacement. The broker has offered them £3000 as this is what he claims the assessor has valued it at, though he's said different things at different times regarding the assessor's report, first he said it was just to assess the validity of the claim, and it was up to the brothers to prove the value, then he said that the engineer couldn't value it because he was an expert on buildings not machinery, now he's said that the engineer had valued it. I get the feeling he's just making it up as he goes along. I get the impression that Towergate process the claim, but i presume that the broker has some sort of financial interest in reducing it or persuading them to cancel the claim all together, in their last conversation with him, when he offered 3000 as a 'final offer', my friend said we can't accept that, it's worth that much to break up for spares, to which the broker replied "well why don't you do that and not bother claiming then?". He claims that he is liaising with Towergate on their behalf, I believe it would be possible to talk to Towergate directly, and this is what i will suggest they do next i think.

As far as i can see, membership of such organisations is voluntary, an auctioneer that routinely defrauds their customers may well not bother with membership of such bodies. I would wonder though, if the auctioneer were doing this regularly, how they would know which vendors hadn't seen their lot sold? The police say it's a civil matter, but then the police always say that, they're only partly correct. If the auctioneer made an error, and refused to rectify it, then it would be a civil matter, if they're deliberately short changing people, that's fraud and definitely a criminal matter. Unfortunately you have no actual evidence beyond your gut feeling that this is the case, so they won't be interested. I tend to feel that trading standards are your best bet.

Well quite, so going back to a company that had already tried (in your view) to cheat you once, and then not being present at the sale to check that all was above board was perhaps a curious choice on your part. Personally if i were the auctioneer i would have shown you the footage to satisfy you, but it's up to them, and there's nothing you can do to compel them to show it to you. As for involving the press, i doubt they would be interested as there is no hard evidence of fraud, they can't really write a story about how you have a sneaking suspicion that you've been ripped off. Report to trading standards, at the very least, they will know if there have been similar complaints that indicate a pattern of dodgy behaviour, and they can advise you of any complaints procedure. Other than that, does the auctioneer belong to any trade body such as the NAVA? as they would have a structured complaints procedure for their members.

As far as I'm aware the freedom of information act only applies to public authorities and government agencies, you can't compel a private company to disclose information. You can request CCTV footage of yourself from any company that records images of you, but in this case it's your van that's been videoed, and obviously you weren't present so that doesn't help you. Speaking to Trading Standards is your best bet. If th auctioneers are cheating people like this though, how would they know which sellers are not present at the auction?

Hi Trojan, thanks for the advice. The reason that the value of the machine is set at £5,000 is because that's what the brothers paid for it, they brought it from a friend who was retiring and it needed some repairs to it. They're very honest sorts so when asked to value it for insurance purposes they gave the value they paid for it. It seems that the machine is worth a bit more than they actually paid, i've been told by an expert who kindly offered to value it that the very bottom value of the machine for export to Poland is £5000, most similar machines are advertised for at least £6500, the brothers would be happy with £5000 though. I think, from reading a very snotty email the broker sent that the insurers have not attempted to value the machine at all, their assessor has simply validated the claim as legitimate. they've offered the brothers 2 to 3 thousand based on a percentage of the insured value, if they'd have insured it for £10K then they might have offered £6K, and so on. Th broker is being really obstructive and rude, verging on harassment, is it correct as suggested above that he would have a financial incentive in reducing the claim value? as this is the only explanation i can think of for his behaviour. It seems to me that he's just obfuscating in the hope that they will either settle for the smaller amount or give up and forget the claim, would you suggest dealing with towergate direct and bypassing the broker? one of the brothers rang towergate and did get some small amount of sense from them, they also seemed to be concerned about the brokers behaviour, though after the'd spoken to towergate he got an email from the broker saying something like 'thank you for going behind my back to towergate, this has just wasted more time....it went on at some hectoring length, i can't remember the exact words but it was very rude.

Whilst I agree with you regarding dealing via email rather than call centres, i'd be inclined to ring 150 and talk to the billing dept. Orange generally aren't so bad to deal with via the phone, this is a relatively straight forward issue, they ought to be able to sort this for you.