Hi

[brokencar]

Hi everyone, just trying to find my way around this forum not sure where I should be posting....to cut a long story short, I could do with some advice on the following:

Bought a car from a used car dealership. Gear box broke. They fixed it. 15 months later, driving down the motorway, engine literally fell out of car. Towed to garage locally, engine put back together again but cost £1k. Garage has told me that engine fell out due to shoddy work when fixing the gear box (they say can tell from the screws etc, that was from when this work was done). Do I have any recourse to get this money back from the used car dealers (who are typical used car salesmen...not an authorised dealership). I've read that we'd have needed to give garage opportunity to quote in first place, but this wasn't poss as didn't realize they had caused the problem until the garage fixed it and told us...
Please help, I'm very out of pocket...!
Thanks

[Guest]

Re: Hi

For any number of reasons you may not wish to give the original supplying car dealer the opportunity to work on the car again, not least of which is the poor standard of workmanship they have displayed.

In this case, you should obtain a report from the garage that repaired the latest damage, giving full details of the reasons for the damage.

Then you may issue a claim against the original dealership. However, fifteen months may be considered a long time and you may not be able to recover the full amount as your rights do weaken over time.

If the damage is directly and irrefutably attributable to the work the dealership did, or did not do then I would expect you to have a strong case and you should issue them with a Letter Before Action explaining that you expect them to contribute to your costs, why you expect this and giving them fourteen days to do so.

At the expiry of your deadline and provided that they have not paid you, issue a claim against them for the amount you have lost.