We were looking for a particular make/model of used car & spotted an interesting one at Sascron Basingstoke which is about 1hr 30min from home.
Keen to view it, I called on a Friday afternoon to make sure it was still available. The sales person (Ian) confirmed it was on-site so we set off 5 minutes later.When we arrived at Sascron we'd got one step inside the showroom before being told that someone had taken the car off to Swindon & wouldn't be back for some hours! Fuming, we battled the rush-hour traffic back home having wasted around 3 hours in total.
I should have 'taken the hint' after that fiasco but this car still looked the best we'd found to date so I called two days later to see if I could go back to see it. This time the car wasn't even there, it was supposedly behind locked gates at the garage owner's house as he'd driven it home before going away for a few days.
Two days later I finally got to view the car. I dealt with James. Despite phoning ahead to let him know I was coming, he left the car outside in the rain. As anyone knows, viewing a used car in the rain is not recommended as it's impossible to check the paintwork etc. After asking for a washleather I managed to wipe it down a bit & found several scratches/paint chips (the worst being two very crudely touched-up scratches on the driver's door) along with two stone chips to the windscreen. A road test also showed the air-conditioning to be ineffective.
Everything else seemed fine. James agreed to have the paintwork professionally sorted, the windscreen repaired and the air-conditioning fixed - he said they were sure it only needed a 're-gas'.
On that basis I paid a deposit & agreed to collect the car at the weekend, 4 days later.
We arranged with James to collect the car at 9am on the Saturday morning as we had to be home again by 11am. We arrived exactly on-time but there was no sign of James. His colleague said he'd popped out to the Post Office to tax the car for us but I pointed out that it already had road tax so that couldn't be true. After sitting in frustration for 20 minutes, James rolled in bleary-eyed & carrying his lunch box, clearly just arriving for work!
Strangely, there was still no sign of the car. Half an hour later, it was finally driven onto the forecourt, covered in dust rather than newly-valeted as we'd expected.
Walking over to check it, I immediately noticed the stone chips in the windscreen were still there. They were hard to miss, each being around 1cm across. I pointed them out to James who assured me they had been repaired. I knew they hadn't and could still feel with my fingernail the marks left by the stones that had caused the damage. James still swore the screen had been repaired the previous day as did his superior - Carl who tried to tell me the chips that could be felt with a fingernail were made by the repairer's drill-bit!
I was exasperated, the repairs had clearly not been done yet here were these two insisting they had! I then asked to see the paperwork left by this supposed professional screen repairer. After disappearing into his office for a few minutes Carl came sheepishly back outside and finally admitted the repairs had not been done. We then agreed on a price reduction so we could get the screen repairs done ourselves.
Whilst waiting for Carl to produce the screen repairer's paperwork I saw that none of the paintwork repairs had been done either. To try to mask this, someone had sprayed a thick layer of some sort of silicone gel onto the part of the driver's door with the worst scratches. After taking out a paper tissue and wiping all this gunk off it was clear nothing had been done other than try to hide the evidence!
At that moment a young man in overalls appeared with a pot of 'touch-up' paint & started dabbing spots of paint on the stone chips around the bonnet area. After around 45 minutes it was finally looking 'presentable' so we paid the balance of the purchase price and my wife prepared to drive off.
Unfortunately, with the drama over the non-existent windscreen and paintwork repairs, I was distracted from remembering to check if the air-con was now working efficiently. Luckily, I remembered whilst my wife was fastening her seat belt so I turned the air-con to its coldest setting and ran the engine. Guess what - it was still blowing warm air five minutes later!
Fuming, I went back inside to look for James who was now, oddly, nowhere to be seen. I did eventually track him down and asked whether, seeing as how none of the other agreed repairs had been done, he'd not had the air-con fixed either? He insisted that he'd personally taken it in the day before & that it was working when he drove it back.
Continued...... read more
