as many of you know, iv been known to sell a few cars, either in the local paper, or on well known auction site....and i advertise them totally warts n all honestly....., could be the buyers spending ALL his money on his dream car, and if it has any hidden faults, im sure he/she are gona be less than chuffed..
you may remember i told y'all a wee story about going up to aberden to see a hopelessley mis-described jaguar xj12..(could have, maybe should have, chinned the timewasting git!!)
..im just wondering in these days of chipperry and re-maps etc, that may be invisible to the eye, how you would stand if you bought a car described as standard and it was later found out to have been re-mapped or chipped etc.., and this tuning had caused problems, mechanical or otherwise..
..when i looked for my fiat coupe i knew that there was a thriving tuning industry for these cars and set out to find a totally original unmolested example....i would have been furious if id found out the car had had tuning mods that had been undisclosed at the time of the sale....how would i have stood, legally if that was the case??...
these are surely murky waters for buyers and sellers, if a car is 'chipped' or upgraded in any way and sold as standard, the new owner may actually be driving uninsured as his new pride and joy will, unbeknownst to him, have modifications that he has not declared to his insuruers...
it used to be that unscrupulous tuners could build a nova 1.2 with a retop engine in it and keep it registered as a 1.2 for insurance purposes..in these days of electrickery plug n play modifications, how do we know what we are buying......????..
no wonder i like older cars...pretty bloody simple to spot if somone has dropped a v8 in your volvo amazon eh???
Originally posted by Bamford: It's to your credit that you advertise your cars honestly. But i won't be moaning if i buy a 335d Coupe one day and it has had DMS do a nice re-map!
As long as work has been done properly i am not too worried really. Mostly.
yeah ok..but, god forbid, lets say you put it in a ditch and then the insurance investigators say, oh, it seems your car has a remap and your fully comprehensive insurance is not going to pay you a dime..
.or you buy something relatively new, or at least under manufacturers warranty, and it goes bang...and the garage say, oh sorry, seems your car has had a re-map/chip that invalidates your warranty..and you dont get a dime...
you were the innocent party in all this..you bought the car believeing it to be standard.....where do you stand legally...
personally, i would never buy a car that was chipped/mapped or had any other performance ad ons...im not against modded cars, id just ratehr buy an original, well maintained example and have the modifications done myself, but buying someone elses..no thanks...
.modded motors are driven harder, and though they may receive more love and attention from their owners, they may not....if id bought a coupe with 300hp upgrades and knew about it, and it promptly went bang, id only have myself to blame...the last owner wouldnt have fitted the upgrades for more mpg and cos he was going to drive it steadily....however, if my coupe went bang because it had upgrades i didnt know about and was never told about, id be furious and straight on the phone to my lawyer mate to see what could be done....failing that, im sure i could explain to the vendor the error of his ways and point out some severe costs, both fiscal and otherwise that he may incur in the future as a result of his duplicity...
I suspect that if its from a private owner its "buyer beware", unless you specifically asked and they said no - with a dealer maybe it would be different.....
..so that pretty much gives the vendro carte blanche to lie in a private sale?....one of the many reasons why i try and only buy cars from people i meet and like.....
When you buy a used car from a private individual you have absoloutly no comeback whatsoever. The sale is "sold as seen" and it is up to you as the purchaser to make sure that it meets your requirements. If you buy a car of that well known auction site which is described as standard and doesnt mention remapping etc but it has had one then it is your own hard luck for not having checked. I know thats harsh but thats the risk you take with a private sale. From a dealer it is different as they have to comply with sales of good legislation even with used cars.
So, George, buy your dream car and have to put in an insurance claim could leave you uninsured. Your recompence.....
Don't always assume that the seller of a naff car will be some sort of easy touch, though. He could easily be a very nasty piece of work, with many just as nasty friends, who perhaps owe him favours, worth staying well away from.
Originally posted by Bamford: Don't always assume that the seller of a naff car will be some sort of easy touch, though. He could easily be a very nasty piece of work, with many just as nasty friends, who perhaps owe him favours, worth staying well away from.
Indeed he could be, BUT.....
so could the buyer and the buyer has to know where the seller lives, the seller doesnt have to know where the buyer lives.
I know it isn't foolproof, but i NEVER sell cars from my front door. I always sell from a car dealer friend of mine, just over 7 miles away. Simply because you do get nutters occasionally.
There is a fine line between outright lies, not volunteering the truth unless asked and different viewpoints.
Buying a car is not a science. Some people genuinely think that their motor is more special than I think it is. This is often the case with members of owner clubs. They aren't telling lies just inflated ideas of their motor. It is just the collision of two subjective views of their car. Their view and my view.
Originally posted by Bamford: Don't always assume that the seller of a naff car will be some sort of easy touch, though. He could easily be a very nasty piece of work, with many just as nasty friends, who perhaps owe him favours, worth staying well away from.
Originally posted by Bamford: Don't always assume that the seller of a naff car will be some sort of easy touch, though. He could easily be a very nasty piece of work, with many just as nasty friends, who perhaps owe him favours, worth staying well away from.
im always happy to take my chances.....
If you're a big guy, who also knows how to use his strength, you'll be okay.
95 times out of 100.
It's when that confidence collides with someone bigger/crazier/armed that it becomes a bit dodgy and there are quite a few dead 'strongmen'. I knew a huge guy from Hartlepool, who grew up winning street fights for money. He's not here anymore, because a 9-stone weakling bided his time, then shot him dead.......
Once sold an imported integrale for an overseas friend to three massive weegie gangsters. Seriously its not easy haggling with em in your kitchen!! I took the £3000 cash, could have been fake for all i knew.
I was messing myself and my housemates wanted to kill me after.
they would be taking their chances....c'est la vie....but then i only sell nice, clean, original cars with history and provenance, and, as i said, im crushingly honest in my descriptions. i could have sold my coupe earlier this year but took it off the market due to potential clutch problems...i still drive it with the clutch the way it is, and to be honest, i doubt a normal punter would have noticed, but i couldnt live with myself if the new owner had spent every dime he had on his dream coupe and then been stuck with a £400 repair bill somewhere down the line he couldnt afford to pay...
...i have only returned cars twice in 150 or so owned, both time it never needed anything other than polite debate, and both times it was directly due to something being wrong with the car which the vendor had assured me was fixed...way i look at it, if i buy a car and the engine falls out at the end of the street, thats life, i should have been more careful..but if, for instance, as happened with an uno i bought many many moons ago, the vendor tells me that the head gasket has just been replaced and the car boils up on the way home, its going back..and it did...
..that was two lessons learnt that day, i now never buy a car thats had the head off for anything, and i dont buy cars from teh kind of people who live on scrapyards in a caravan. i will always return a car on a point of principle. principles and strong moral fibre will get you much further than brute strenght and ignorance in my experience.
..by the same token, when i sell off the auction site, if someone comes to view one of my cars after they have won the bidding, and change their mind, or, for whatever reason claim the car not to be as described, i allow them to walk away with no hard feeling and no bad feedback. this has happened only once and the second chance offer next highest bidder snapped the car up.
i abhor bulys and the kind of people who think that they can get what they want by pulling a knife, a gun, or flexing their muscles. iv spent my whole adult life working in a violent environment and dealing with all sorts of naughty people, but dont for one minute think im the sort of stereotype meathead you may presume works in this industry...its always better to work from the neck up than the neck down, and its always better to leave people wondering how hard the big dog bites and being thankful he never rather than getting a name for snapping and biting everyone..as you so rightly pointed out, bad dogs get put to sleep by someone...and bullys ALWAYS get bullied in the end......ya cant start quarrels with karma cos karma's always gonna bite yer ass in the end..
...and waht the hell does all this rambling have to do with cars anyhow...
Seldom do I post on this forum but I read it on a daily basis. It has to be said XNtrikalfaman, as has been mentioned before that some of your posts make for great reading! What you've just written pretty much sums up how I try to live my life.....It's all about good Karma for me too. Having just sold mine and the wifes car so we can source just one decent motor, I was more than happy to let them go for bargain money with warts and all disclosed! Fingers crossed that there might be a few quid left for that Lada Niva I still lust after!
