Sold my car and buyer isn't happy

[monotonousmum]

I sold my car at the weekend, and the buyer has messaged today to say she isn't happy.

Car is 13 years old. Only known issue is that the boot needs to be opened via remote button on the key. It's been like this for three years - and I showed her this before she took the car.

This morning I've had a text to say she's taken it to a garage and they've valued it at £900 under what she paid for it. Brakes need doing, wiper needs replacing, and apparently an electrical problem causes the boot issue.

She hasn't asked me for anything yet. Just told me she's not happy.

I've sent a polite response back to say its a good car, and she should maybe get another opinion. A dealer offered me £200 under what she paid for it last week, and it's a 13 year old car so not going to be perfect.

I offered her to test drive it, she didn't want to. She asked for a reduced price, which was agreed (slightly more than she offered, but £300 less than my asking price). The price was in line with the autotrader valuation, and similar cars for sale.

I feel bad for her if she's not happy, but I have no intention of giving her a refund or anything. AIBU?

Honestly when my brakes have needed doing my mot centre tells me these are fine now but change them in the next 6 months or whatever the last garage I had my mot done at said I needed a new tyre in the next 6 months or 12 if boris locks us down again that's standard isnt it? I call it work fishing but it helps me know when I need work doing because I'm clueless really

The phrases spring to mind of "sold as seen" and "buyer beware". You did your job in getting as much as you could for your car, she didn't do her job in making sure the vehicle was what she wanted. Realistically, what can she expect to gain from complaining?

The buyer would have to somehow prove OP knew the brakes needed replaced and didn't tell her... It doesn't sound like OP knew, and it would be almost impossible to prove.
It's probably the shoes or pads that need replacing, not the brakes as a whole. Brake pads are ridiculously easy to change by yourself as well.

It is completely on the buyer for not inspecting and test driving the car. I've driven one that looked fine but as soon as I set off on the test drive I could tell the clutch was slipping, which would probably have cost the near enough the value of the car to replace. If the buyer couldn't tell this sort of thing herself, she should have brought someone who could.

@Discovereads
It can be both. OP priced the car £500 over the price a dealer offered last week. If this is a price jump from say £2000 to £2500, as could be with a car that old then sorry that is greed. Used cars don’t increase in value by that much in a week.

It sounds as though the OP has allowed for bartering with whoever was going to purchase, they probably would have gone down to a similar price to what the garage offered but the purchaser agreed a price, I imagine shaking hands on the deal. They’ve not sold a cut n shut and if you look at any website regarding buying a car they recommend getting someone to look at the vehicle. The OP probably would’ve held the car for the buyer to have it looked over but they chose to hand over their £££ at a price they agreed.

What would you do if you were selling a house? It’s valued at offers near £85,000. Blind bidding, two people wanted it and there were two offers at the same time one cash buyer, no chain offers £87,500 and another homeowner, part of a chain of 5 other homeowners offer £87,000 would your conscience allow you to take the better offer, would that be greedy too, or would you say it’s ok you can have it for £85k?

@thedancingbear
Your fault is potentially selling a car that is unroadworthy, most plausibly because it has faulty brakes (if this turns out to be true, which is a big if). Fine if you tell your buyer that the brakes need looking at, not fine if you haven't.

If the new owners were stopped by the police and there was a fault, whether a bulb was out or the brakes weren’t working, the vendor would not be prosecuted. The onus is on the driver/purchaser.

Because that assumes that the seller 'knows cars' and can spot that there are issues. I could say my car is totally fine - because to me it is. But I wouldn't know what I was looking at if I saw the brakes, I couldn't tell if they were good or not, all I can say is when I drive it there are no issues. So I wouldn't be lying, I'd be genuinely unaware of the issues. So I would take someone with me who knows cars, not because I don't trust the seller, but because I can't be sure the seller would know if there was an issue.

Just to say - not sure where the requirement for the car to be roadworthy for a private sale that is mentioned in a couple of posts has come from but it's nonsense (in the UK at least) - there is no such requirement. You don't even have to draw attention to any defects - what you cannot do is tell lies about them.

OP priced the car £500 over the price a dealer offered last week. If this is a price jump from say £2000 to £2500, as could be with a car that old then sorry that is greed. Used cars don’t increase in value by that much in a week.

Sorry, that's not how it works. If you sell to a dealership you sell at less than you would get if you sold privately. (Because the dealer needs to be able to sell the same car at a profit.) Likewise if you buy a car privately, you pay less, partly because of the risk involved.

It is not greed, it's the market and it's how the market has always worked. Some people might choose to take the dealer's lower offer because it saves them the time and hassle of selling direct to a buyer. Some may want to get a higher offer from a private buyer, not because it's "gone up in value" but because they can get a better price and the buyer can get a better price.

This is the buyer's problem, not your OP.

Why is it ok to assume the buyer is a
scammer but not ok to ask the OP why
they priced the car £500 over it’s market value

where are you getting this from?

the OP sold the car for £500 more than a dealer offered her for it. Dealers do not pay “market value” for second hand cars.

what they pay + their costs / profit = market value.

they would have charged more than the OP for the car if they had sold it on.

also, lol @ your claims of an unethical sale. Surely you’ve heard of the basic economic rule of supply and demand?

I'm gobsmacked @Discovereads last time I sold a car (ages ago btw). Dealer offered me £800 trade in value.

I sold it privately for 2K (and bought my new car from a different dealer) who wasn't trying to rip me off and didn't try to stop me test driving the car i wanted on the basis of my biological sex. Apparently women don't drive Audi A3s....

I bought another Golf in the end.

“Sold as seen.”

It’s not your fault she didn’t have the wherewithal to check anything. You don’t get a guarantee with a private sale, if she was that cautious she should have gone to a dealership.

my wipers cost me £16 fitted from halfords.

Not sure why brakes and an electrical issue are your fault. you dont expect a second hand car to be perfect condition.

There’s some shocking ignorance on this thread.

It comes from Section 75(1) of the Road Traffic Act 1988:

www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/52/section/75

-which doesn't distinguish between private and trade sellers.

Ss 6(b) is basically 'the above doesn't count if it's sold for scrap' provision.

I await your apology.

Ignore her. If you want a warranty then buy from a dealership

Dancingbear do you have any idea of the evidence required to prove a that a car was defective under s.75(1)? Do you imagine that there are criminal cases being brought all the time when someone sells a car which later has a defect or which suffers from wear and tear? Maybe you are trying to persuade us all to be gullible enough to take our cars to garages and get unnecessary work done on brakes which are simply somewhat worn but still not dangerous, just in case a seller somewhere might make a complaint to the police that their currently MOT'd car was taken to a garage who said they needed their brakes fixed?

So therefore, you would think that you could go away, have a little google and come up with some criminal case law where that has actually occurred.

Are you the poster who thinks there are fixed prices for cars as well, I find it hard to distinguish?

She needs to re-think her strategy of privately buying a car if she doesn't know what she's doing.
I KNOW I don't know what I'm doing, so that's why every car I buy, even second hand, comes from a dealership.
Frankly, if you are up for buying a 13 year old car, you MUST know it's likely to be a bit of a banger, however much the seller bigs it up.

I bought a car last year. The man said it was 'all fine' and that he was upgrading his car. In fact he had the new one outside his house. We took it for a test drive. It seemed ok to DH. We now realise that he's completely mucked up the electrics by fitting third party equipment. The clutch is on the way out. The gear box is on the way out. Did we go back to him? No. It's our fault and we've learned a good lesson. We'll drive the car to the ground, then replace.

I bought a car last month. There was a known fault and the (trade) seller offered me the option of buying it 'as is' for a lower than advertised price, or buying it with the problem resolved, for the advertised price (they thought they had fixed it but hadn't). We opted for them to fix it. It cost them £1100 to fix it, mostly because they kept chasing the fault and replacing bits until they found that it was a little tear on a hose. Now, we have the car, but I've noticed the air con and heater don't really work well. Will we go back to them? No. It's our fault and we didn't check.

Sold as seen. You offered her a test drive. She declined.

Windscreen wipers are about £3 each.

Don't reply.

I do actually know of where the police were involved in this type of thing though. An ex boyfriend sold a car and much the same thing happened, except the buyer actually got a real bargain and the car was slightly newer. The buyer had it for a week and then texted him to say he had taken it to his friend who was a car mechanic and he said it needed (I can't remember the exact figure) £xxx worth of repairs, so could he send him a cheque?

Ex boyfriend replied saying no, theres nothing wrong with it and you had a chance to inspect before you bought. Then followed a barrage of messages, increasingly threatening. Think up to 6 each night. It got so bad that ex messaged him to say just bring the car back and I'll give you your money back, but no, that wasn't good enough, because apparently the buyer had incurred expenses and wanted compensated. It was all a pack of lies. After a week, I urged ex to go to the police, who really dealt with it well. They made it quite clear that we shouldn't have to put up with that, that it was a well known scam and that they would phone the buyer and tell him to stop.

No more messages. No-one murdered us or vandalised our garden either.

I have 25yrs motor trade experience. OP please repeat this to yourself

YOU HAVE ZERO MECHANICAL KNOWLEDGE

In other words you cannot be expected to know one way or another if there is or isnt anything wrong with your car. If i ask "are the brakes ok", you dont bloody know. If i ask "Is the engine ok", You dont know. The only questions you can answer are

When is the MOT due
How much will it cost

If i asked you how to carry out frontal lobe brain surgery you would tell me to jog on. Why should you be able to answer mechanical questions about a car. Anyone questioning the price you charged hasnt got a scooby about selling a used car. A garage would buy your car, put it through their workshops, make sure it was roadworthy, mot it and put an element of profit way more than a few hundred quid. You did EVERYTHING correctly

There are actually quite a lot of convictions under this provision - google it. It's usually dealers, I grant you, and, from memory, prosecutions have tended to be where dealers have sold multiple ringers and Trading Standards have evidence of deliberate wrongdoing.

But the provision applies to private sales too. A prosecution would be unlikely but not impossible - if the buyer drives off and is immediately involved in a serious crash, and the brakes are obviously faulty, then meeting the criminal standard isn't going to be difficult.

I don't have any particular agenda in posting this, but the fact is that, if the OP has sold a car with faulty brakes, and has not disclosed this, she has broken the law. Small claims route is much more viable than trading standards, of court, at least if her buyer has a mate in a garage who is prepared to give a statement.

Block her number.

If it mattered that much she should have got a mechanic to look before not after the sale.
It's her responsibility now so stop engaging.