Bought new car from EBAY then broke down 4 weeks later help !!!!!

[danielr]

So what is incorrect about the advert, that you can prove the seller knew about?

proving that the seller 'knows' about it isn't the point.

 

you could have a brand new car that failed in the first few weeks.

 

you'd still expect the dealer to fix the car so that it was fit for purpose and as described...

 

the dealer might not have known about the problem, but you'd still expect them to fix it. (or would you just put up with all faults on a new car because the dealer 'obviously' didn't know about them at the point of sale?

 

nobody expects a seller to take a car apart and inspect all the bits, or x-ray a car to see the condition of the bits, but you can expect an advert to be accurate.

 

I don't think that anyone is saying that you should get a 6 year extended warranty on a £500 car, just that you wouldn't expect the car to fail in less than a month.

 

 

also you wouldn't expect someone who has advertised them self as a trader to tell you it's your fault/not their problem etc in the way that the OP described.

[Kraken1]

It is for a claim under misrep or for an express term of the contract. there doesn't appear to be any way of proving that the advert was not correct. this claim therefore falls away. Outside of these you are left with a claim under SoGA that the car was not of satisfactory quality.

 

Goods are of satisfactory quality if they meet the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory, taking account of any description of the goods, the price (if relevant) and all the other relevant circumstances.

 

Where a car is purchased very cheaply, and £500 is cheap for a car (a quarter of

the value set by the govt scrappage scheme) then the price is relevant. Would the reasonable man expect a brand new car to be trouble free? Yes, and case law reflects this. So then, this being the standard of a new car, then the standard of a cheap second hand car must be substantially less. You therefore need to expect that a banger might need work on it and that some parts of it might fail. If it does fail then this fact alone does not mean that it is not of satisfactory quality and it does not obligate the seller to fix it.

 

the older and cheaper a car gets, the more problems you need to expect.

 

the law treats new goods differently to second hand.

 

 

also you wouldn't expect someone who has advertised them self as a trader to tell you it's your fault/not their problem etc in the way that the OP described.

 

actually I would. Reading these boards shows you that retailers will often try and fob you off. what surprises me here is that the dealer offered something at all, when he can probably get away with just ignoring the OP.

 

In the end, to paraphrase, sue and be damned. But I think in this instance the op will lose out by taking action, he'll have no clutch kit, and will have spent money on the court costs.

[heliosuk]

I would say Kraken has got this in a nutshell.

 

As I keep pointing out the SOGA rules are not clear cut and the basis of UK law is what a reasonable person would expect from a easonable person.

In this case the person selling the car has been more than reasonable to the extent that I would say has been over reasonable.

 

SOGA is good for new cars but is fundamentally flawed for used cars and a lot of people on this site need to understand this.

 

Take it to court by all means but don't expect to come out smiling, it could and am confident it would, cost you a damm site more.

 

If this dealer is willing to give a clutch kit on a £500 car we ought to be flocking to him!!!

[danielr]

It is for a claim under misrep or for an express term of the contract. there doesn't appear to be any way of proving that the advert was not correct. this claim therefore falls away. Outside of these you are left with a claim under SoGA that the car was not of satisfactory quality.

 

Goods are of satisfactory quality if they meet the standard that a reasonable person would regard as satisfactory, taking account of any description of the goods, the price (if relevant) and all the other relevant circumstances.

 

Where a car is purchased very cheaply, and £500 is cheap for a car (a quarter of

the value set by the govt scrappage scheme) then the price is relevant. Would the reasonable man expect a brand new car to be trouble free? Yes, and case law reflects this. So then, this being the standard of a new car, then the standard of a cheap second hand car must be substantially less. You therefore need to expect that a banger might need work on it and that some parts of it might fail. If it does fail then this fact alone does not mean that it is not of satisfactory quality and it does not obligate the seller to fix it.

 

the older and cheaper a car gets, the more problems you need to expect.

 

the law treats new goods differently to second hand.

 

 

 

 

actually I would. Reading these boards shows you that retailers will often try and fob you off. what surprises me here is that the dealer offered something at all, when he can probably get away with just ignoring the OP.

 

In the end, to paraphrase, sue and be damned. But I think in this instance the op will lose out by taking action, he'll have no clutch kit, and will have spent money on the court costs.

 

you are completely misunderstanding what I'm saying... (at least I think you are).

 

 

Whilst I agree that if you only pay £500 you can't expect a new car...

 

my point is:

 

a second hand cheap car, doesn't have to be a banger, you seem to be under the impression that if you only pay £500 for a car you actually SHOULD expect it to fall apart whilst you're driving off the forecourt. -this is why I said I've had many experiences where cheap cars have lasted for years. I may have been lucky. but I doubt that I was lucky in the same way twice, and my mates were lucky in the exact same circumstance etc...

 

the dealer SHOULD be professional about it, they should have worked with the OP to try to reach some kind of resolution. on reflection I actually agree that the OP should have took the clutch kit and gone to a garage, either that or actually rejected the car outright. after all the person who sold the car IS a trader, and the OP SHOULD be covered under some SOGA rules.

I know some dealers try to shirk their responsibility. but if a dealer says this then surely on this board advice should be how to get the dealer to live up to their responsibilities, not you sitting there saying, it doesn't matter that the trader isn't complying with what could be their obligations.

you seem to be suggesting that the OP hasn't spent enough to be covered by SOGA. that's simply not true.

 

the government scrap scheme is largely irrelevant,

in my case for example I have a car that would qualify, now why aren't I driving around in a nice new 09/59 plate car?

well it's simple, i can't afford a new car, I can't afford and don't want finance to get a new car, there is a reason that I'm driving around in a car that only cost £300 3 years ago, it's all I can afford, by all means take 2 grand off the price of a new car, I estimate that might make the cheapest car about £6000, to be honest, if I had £6k to spend on a car I'd have a new car, or a much nicer second hand car...

 

long story short, government scrap scheme is completely irrelevant in this instance. the fact that the government would have given the previous owner £2000 to scrap it, (on condition that they paid tens of thousands more propping an industry). it's not worth £2000 to the new owner (OP either) as it now doesn't meet conditions of the scheme.

 

but let's take what you're saying and look at it a different way...

 

you say that the car is worth a quarter of the car scrap allowance,

I say that the car is worth 2 month finance payments of a brand new car.

 

so even if I've been lucky with my previous car purchases etc,

I think that you could still expect a car to last a few months, so going wrong within the first four weeks is at the very least less than half the life you might expect to want to get from this purchase...

 

 

 

(so yes, a clutch kit worth half the price paid for the car, would be, -in my opinion, a good thing for the OP to have gotten...).

 

However I still question whether the OP shouldn't just return the car outright. and try to get some of the money back.

[heliosuk]

Danielr, the OP has a frivelous claim and is being wholly unreasonable in trying to pursue this given what has been offered.

 

Further you obviously don't understand the purpose of the scrappage scheme which was two fold in it intensions and has been perhaps one of the more successfull initiatives this Government introduced.

 

The car didn't fall apart when driving off the forecourt and I very much doubt the dealer knew the condition.

[Kraken1]

I think you are confusing two concepts, the ideal world where you'd hope something happened, and a buyers rights under consumer law as it is today.

 

Further, for the same reason that the buyer is likely to fail in court for the cost of a repair, I think he'd fail in an attempt to reject the car. He'd not make a case for the repair as he would struggle to show a breach of contract and likewise he'd struggle to reject.

 

There is also case law to get over, for eg Bernstein v Pamson Motors where a consumer was unable to reject a car after a handful of miles and three weeks or so. Generally, however, this is not considered to be good law these days, and is too harsh, but it is still knocking around. Even subsequent cases such as clegg v anderson which you'd have thought would kill it off, didn't entirely.

 

Other cases are more helpful with much longer periods to reject, measured in months, but these concerned new cars and attempts to repair. Neither we have here (for eg Fiat Auto Financial Services v Connelly).

 

And ultimately, there is nothing terminal with the car, it just needs a repair, the same type of repair many many cars need at a certain age. When I was first starting to drive my father would tell me that 70000 miles was a watershed, after this you needed to expect to replace exhausts, radiators, clutches, brakes, timing belts etc and if buying a car like this I should look at the service history to see if these had been done. I admit this is going back a few years, but I think the principle is sound.

 

It is not that the buyer has not spent enough to be covered by the SoGA, it is simply that he is, but that in this instance it is unlikely to offer any remedy. I appreciate your points about some folk only being able to afford a few hundred quid on a car, but this truth does not magically mean that the quality that few hundred buys improves. Just because I can only afford economy burgers from aldi, does not mean that they are as good as fillet-mince burgers from a specialist butcher.

[danielr]

Further you obviously don't understand the purpose of the scrappage scheme which was two fold in it intensions and has been perhaps one of the more successfull initiatives this Government introduced.

I understand the point of the scrap scheme, and it has no relevance at all to this thread, other than to say that any car worth less than £2000 is a heap of junk that should be scrapped and replaced with a new car, because, why sell a car for less than £2000, when you can get £2000 for it? but yes, it's a successful scheme, it's done amazingly well at propping up the German auto industry, but doesn't have a lot of relevance here. (in this thread).

 

The car didn't fall apart when driving off the forecourt and I very much doubt the dealer knew the condition.

 

Firstly, I never argued that the dealer did know the absolute condition of the clutch, and I already said that it would be impractical for the dealer to absolutely know the condition of the clutch in every car they sold.

the point that I was making is that if a car is sold as good, you would expect it to last a little longer than 4 weeks/185 miles.

 

I think you might be expecting to much for £500 in terms of a car,

you get what you pay for. If you had it couple of days then fair enough but after a month on a £500 car you cant really expect a warranty.

 

You cannot buy a car off eBay without expecting something to go wrong.

 

I'm guessing that you're agreeing with those posts? that the OP just hasn't spent enough to expect to get something that doesn't just fall apart?

 

In this case I don't think that this motor would be deemed not of satisfactory quality. it cost £500. around 10% of the cost of the cheapest new car. At best therefore it can only be considered to be 10% as good.

A car for £500 should be worth 500. Compare it to the 'perfect' new version. this should give an idea of the level of deterioration etc you should expect.

 

I agree 100% (well 90%) with what is said in these posts, you spend £500 you don't expect a new car, you spend 10% of the price you can only expect 10% of wear left in items...

 

but we're not talking about 6 months later and 10,000 miles,

 

we're talking 4 weeks later and 185 miles.

 

I don't change the clutch in my car once a year or more, I don't change the clutch every 2k miles, and I'd be astounded if I did have to replace the clutch and shocks on a new car (brand new) within the first 6-9 months of owning the car whilst only having done less than 5000 miles.

 

so whilst the OP only paid 10% of what they might have paid for a new car, they've only had less than 1% of the value or use of a new car.

 

on top of that the OP already pointed out that the advert also misslead in terms of milleage. (listed as 73 thousand, actually done 84 thousand).

 

so the only part I don't agree with is...

In this case I don't think that this motor would be deemed not of satisfactory quality.

for the reasons given above, i.e incredibly short time between purchase and breakdown, incredibly low mileage before breakdown...

 

Danielr, the OP has a frivelous claim and is being wholly unreasonable in trying to pursue this given what has been offered.

 

I agree that the OP was offered a fair fix and should perhaps have accepted that.

 

out of interest, (as you work in the trade). what's the value of a clutch kit?

I've just seen one, (listed on ebay as new) for a rover 216 on ebay for £10.

is it really fair that in the worst case estimations the buyer has had less than half the expected enjoyment of the car and is being offered (in monetary terms). less than 1/50th of the price of the car and around 1/20th of the complete cost of getting the clutch and having it fitted.

[Kraken1]

I think the most telling argument, is that a majority of posters seems to think that there is no claim due to the age, mileage and cost of the car. As the test for satisfactory quality is what a reasonable man would consider to be satisfactory, then I'd suggest that the car was of satisfactory quality.

 

Also, when looking at the 10% argument, you are seeing this as 10% of the value of the car, which is fair enough, but you also need to factor in that this is the last 10%.

 

I agree 100% (well 90%) with what is said in these posts, you spend £500 you don't expect a new car, you spend 10% of the price you can only expect 10% of wear left in items...

 

This statement is therefore right. So the test would be what is the average age or condition of a car when items such as a clutch need replacing? But it is not 10% of wear in items, it is the car. A clutch is one of those expensive items in a car that may need replacing at some point, like tyres, exhausts etc.

[executed_inapt]

Give It Up..ebays A Minefield.paypal Also.you Stand No Chance Unless Hes Feeling Generous Or Suddenly Wins The Lotto.ignore Diplomatic Soloution And Go See Him And Ask Nicely For Your Money Back...although I Will Say If You Bought A Car From Me..and 4 Weeks Later You Come Asking For A Refund......i Wouldnt,in Truth If You Ask Yourself That Question As Well You Wouldnt

 

As I Said Ebay...a Minefield.its Private And Trade Sellers Which Dont Strictly Come Under A Proper Kind Of Law