suckindiesel
RMS Regular
I fully agree with what you say, id buy a car at £1000 with my eyes open and wouldn't be expecting any kind of warrantee. But what happens if a dealer has a £1000 car, nice useable car but a bit old to be offering any sort of warrantee with it?
Legally, can they only sell it as a trade sale to another trader, who will then be in the same predicament as the first dealer, or sell it to the public with a warrantee and probably make no money or loose a bit on it when inevitably something goes wrong in a few months time?
It's just a very grey/messy area and really comes down to how reasonable both parties are and how realistic expectations are, along the general theme of what should be reasonably expected given the price, and that's how small claims would view it. I generally trade/auction cars in this category for this reason (some dealers wouldn't lose a moments sleep over passing a parcel on or shafting someone intention, that's not for me), but in the past would have tried to make it abundantly clear what the person was buying, I suppose like a gentleman's agreement as someone else said, a lot of people get that (so long as the dealer is not trying to pass something off with a major undisclosed fault that they are aware of). If I didn't feel the person grasped that then I would suggest it's not the car for them. I guess also it's different if the car completely quits - like an electric window going, brake calliper sticking or something doesn't mean the car is not fit for purpose, but full engine failure might be different, and again it does depend on how long they have had it. As other dealers will tell you (and I'm not judging or generalising here) often (not always) the person buying a car at the very bottom of the market cannot cope with a £1,000 loss or can't afford to spend more on the car, might have young kids depending on the car etc and that's when it gets really messy as the person can just view it as I bought it off a dealer so it's their fault and that's why I did so, and in that case the £1,000 is a lot of money to them personally and the dealer is going to get the raw end of it. They are much less reasonable than the person who bought the £20k car as a rule.
Reminds me of a woman lambasting me for days - I sold her an old high mileage X5, as it blew a brake line and I could have killed her kids and obviously knew about it etc etc etc. The car had recently been through MOT too, and this was several months post sale. I guess some people are bad at taking responsibility for their own life choices, especially when the pressure is on, the money would have bought a much fresher hatchback.