Please can someone help me with my sister's crappy car???

[MayorNaze]

my sis bought a 2nd hand car from a garage in march. since then she has had to pay out nearly £500 on repairs inc new exhaust, head gaskett and new tyre.

this is really crap and surely not legal? i do have a vague legal background so if someone can give me a clue on how to proceed then i hopefully can take it from there.

many thanks

How is it not legal? How old is the car? Unless there was some sort of warranty (which are often useless) isn't it just caveat emptor?

Still a bummer of course.

agree and for £500 i would expect one of two major probs annoying as it is

really? is it not fit for purpose then if she has had to pay out so much in repairs already??? if i buy shoes and they fall apart after 2 months then i take them back. why does the same not apply to cars??

she is young and poor and naive bless her, i have said i will try and help

you couldn't take 2nd hand shoes back though if they knackered after you bought them

2nd hand cars are sold as seen, surely?

hmmm...i see your point...i just thought that buying through a garage afforded you a degree of protection against this kind of thing

Depends on whether the garage gave any guarantees or warranty....check the purchasing details. There may be some cover if bought with a credit card too.It is usually buyer beware unfortunately.

oh dear

thanks for all your help, pls post if anyone has aything else to add.

No it is not buyer beware. I don't know why so many people seem to think second hand cars are exempt from consumer legislation. They aren't. There is less protection if you are buying from a private seller or in an auction but normal consumer laws apply when buying from a garage.

As this car was bought from a garage it must be of satisfactory quality, roadworthy and as described. Even a very old car should be roadworthy and reliable. Its condition should reflect its age and price. There may be some faults but they should not be excessive. However, fair wear and tear is not a fault - the car doesn't have to be in "as new" condition unless the garage say it is.

If your sister has had the car repaired by another garage, however, she has weakened her position. If the faults started to emerge immediately she could have rejected the car and demanded her money back. It is now too late for that. If it was too late to reject the car when the faults emerged, she should have taken the car back to the garage and demanded that they fix the problems.

If she didn't do that, the garage that sold the car can argue that they haven't been given a reasonable opportunity to repair it themselves and therefore they aren't liable for the costs. However, if she asked them to fix the problems and they refused, she may be able to force them to pay for at least some of the repairs.

The big question is whether the condition of the car reflected its age and price. I can't really comment on that, especially as the £500 referred to in your original post appears to be the cost of repairs, not the cost of the car as other replies seem to have assumed.

Thanks prh47bridge, I certainly didn't realise that...I assumed (obviously wrongly) that if the garage wasn't explicit about warranties,etc, that there was no comeback.

A lot of second hand car dealers rely on people not knowing their rights. Indeed, a lot of second hand car dealers don't know their customers' rights. There is plenty of information about this on the Trading Standards website, Consumer Direct and Which? if anyone wants to know more.

I once worked with someone who was unaware of his rights and allowed a second hand car dealer to sell him a "warranty" with so many exclusions that, as far as I could tell, it only covered the ashtray!

oh sorry mis-read op! must get eyes tested.

thought she had paid £500 for it!

Sale of Goods Acts, 1979 applies; Talk to Trading Standards, but do it soon (tomorrow!).
I know a lot about this, sadly, from personal experience!!

From memory, the dealer I bought my car last year, said that it was law for all dealers to offer 3m warranty.

Unless expressly stated sold as seen and the price would reflect that.

"Sold as seen" is meaningless legally. It does not take away your consumer rights. At best it means that obvious defects such as scratches and dents are excluded. If the exhaust turns out to be faulty the dealer will still be liable.

was there no warranty with it at all?

If you buy a car from a trader ie a garage then you are indeed covered a lot more than is common knowledge.

You have 6 months to raise any issues with the garage. They have to prove that the car was of reasomable quality for what it was, in other words that it was free from major defects. If they sold a car which needed work to be legal and/or safe to drive then they have sold something that is not fit for purpose. It doesn't matter if they could have fixed it or not, if the car has a fault that a 'reasonable person' thinks is major (and assuming this wasn't pointed out at time of sale) then they have to offer a repair, equal value replacement or refund. They DO NOT have to be offered the chance to repair it themselves! This is a common misconception as the law was clarified recently and as a previous poster said, most people don't realise.

We bought a car, 8 years old, which had to be repaired twice by the garage we bought it from. Both times the fault was the same - a warning light meaning it wasn't safe to drive came on. Both times the garage said they had found the fault (different both times allegedly) and both times we accepted the repair. The third time, we had had enough. We refused their offer of a repair, found out LOADS of legal stuff on the internet, and realised we were entitled to a refund (or replacement if they had one).

The garage were resisting until we emailed them the legal cases and gave them notice of our intention to take them to the small claims court. We got a full refund, (eventually) and this was 5 months after we had bought it.

Sale of Goods Act (1979) in the recent cases of Clegg v Andersson 2003 (Court of Appeal) and Edwards v Hartley 2007 (High Court).
Under recent rulings regarding the rejection of goods under the Sale of Goods Act, the legal stance of buyers rejecting faulty goods has been clarified. The pre-requisites for rejecting goods are:

1. The Goods must be defective, and
2. By the time the buyer informs the seller that he has rejected the goods, the buyer must not have accepted the goods or been deemed to have accepted the goods.

I can't find any further links but if you google these case law details you should be able to get more details. The only thing might be if she is deemed to have accepted the car by paying for the faults to be rectified. I suggest you get loaded up on info from the internet then as the CAB for a list of solicitors who offer free half hour consultation and take all the details to them. (We did that, although the solicitor didn't know about the recent case law which was useful - not!)

If that fails, maybe the garage might be a candidate for some publicity - local newspaper with front-page close up of sad faced family with broken car.....

Good luck and stick with it!!

To clarify the two cases mentioned by Kirsty...

Clegg v Andersson changed the way in which sellers have to view purchasers attempting to reject goods and clarified the ways the buyer can be said to have accepted them. One of the ways the buyer can accept the goods is if he does something inconsistent with the goods still being owned by the seller. Getting the car repaired without notifying the seller would therefore constitute accepting the vehicle in most cases and would remove the right to reject.

Edwards v Hartley concerned a new car and decided that the buyer could reject the car 11 months after purchase. The faults had started to become apparent within 14 days of purchase. The buyer contacted the seller who told him to get the car repaired by the local Aston Martin dealer under warranty. After the dealer and manufacturer had spent months trying to fix the car and failing, the buyer rejected it. The seller argued that it was too long after purchase. The courts disagreed.

The important point to note in Edwards v Hartley is that the buyer initially approached the seller to get the problems fixed. He only went to another garage when the seller told him to do so.

If you get a vehicle repaired by a garage other than the seller without first contacting the seller and giving them the opportunity to resolve the matter you will probably lose the right to reject the vehicle and may weaken your position in regards to your other rights. You don't have to let the seller repair the car if, for example, you've lost confidence in their ability to fix the problems. However, you should always contact the seller before having repairs carried out by another garage. If you do have repairs carried out elsewhere you should ask the repairer to write a report on the faults, giving full details of the work carried out and the costs. Ideally you should keep all the defective parts.

Also note that you should always contact the seller quickly when problems emerge. For the first 6 months after you buy the car the seller has to prove that any faults you find were not present when you bought the vehicle. After that the burden of proof is reversed - it is now up to the buyer to prove that the faults were present when the vehicle was purchased.

thankyou everybody for this and sorry i have not returned sooner for an update

the cases/precedents posted are especially useful and i have taken careful note. i have spoken to consumer direct and other lgal pals and we do have redress - i am just off to post a letter in which i summarise everything my sis has done so far to try and solve prob, telling them what we want them to do and giving them a deadline to come back to her on.

have checked where she stands on having repairs done by another garage - she contacted original garage 6x by phone - told someone would call back - didnt - and also wrote to them 3x. by then car was unroadworthy and so she had no choice other than to go elsewhere - apprently this would be seen as reasonable in court of law. garage is not local to her so cannot just turn up.

she has lots of paperwork/records of contact etc so think we can def take it further if no response this time

again, many many thanks for everybody's help on here - iwill let you know what happens

That would be seen as more than reasonable. She gave them every opportunity to resolve the problems and they didn't do so.

Fingers crossed that she gets what she wants from them without too much trouble.