Contracts

Not sure it’s just me but UKCG often cars seem under graded when they turn up.

The future is charging points on lampposts and bollards at the kerbside. As mentioned above, there seems to be good demand for full electric cars, we have a couple of BL Zoe’s pool cars, biggest problem now is we only have one point at the office so use the local Sainsburys to charge but the spaces are often full with the same people sitting in their cars everyday. PHEV (plug in Hybrids) I am not so sure about, we do loads as there are massive company car tax savings (I drive a 330e) but residuals don’t seem that great as the early cars come out of warranty.

Seeing it more down here in the South as a couple of large groups now have second tier outlets for PX cars with Hendy group opening a couple of big supermarket style outlets recently

Took one in PX a couple of years back from a second owner and it had a print out, think it was someone like Nationwide Autocentre (oh pads and disks, pads and disks).

Last week died for us for both leasing and sales. Leasing is still really down but have done a few used this week with phone deposits on 3 more as we did some major price adjustments Monday. Major plus, I took a call from a client today “We need 14 new vans here for Monday, can you do it?” Various salesman I ordered from thought it was Christmas!

Really good start to the year running into this month but since last week sale conversions have completely died off on both sides of the business (leasing and sales). Hopefully next week improves.

It is a real grey area, over the years I have seen loads of warranty claims for engines, gearboxes etc and we have paid a fair few but then we only use main dealers. I doubt many of the future buyers will know but for me it’s a plus point. Last year we sold an Evoque that had just had an engine under warranty and the customer saw it as a bonus, on the other hand we had a F430 with a bill for £46k (was not warranty!) that nobody would touch despite all the paperwork relating to why it was replaced.

Feb-Apr are our busiest months with clients new cars being delivered and the old ones collected. I assume Movex rates reflect the supply and demand as most delivery companies are flat out. An example this week was one main dealer delivered a new Sprinter van to us via some 3rd party transport agent, was a chap with an old SWB Vivaro and trailer, Sprinter back wheels just on the trailer, surely that can’t be legal for weight.

Was a LR franchise, to be fair I have had a few good results from Pendragon dealers over the last year.

Brought a nice Velar from Stratstone last week, absolutely mint, low miles and they failed to notice nearly £12k of options in their pricing! After buying I mentioned how did they reach the price for it and they said it is head office set and looks at similar cars in the local area.

I get a choice of company car which is declared on my P11d as my company car but colleagues enjoy trying to sell them. BMW 330e is current car of choice as 49 co2 for my daily plus a toy for the summer

We use a local company who only do alloys including diamond cuts and they often straighten them for us and the local prestige franchises. I don’t know the process but they have them for about 3 days and I am sure they have mentioned heating them in the past.

The 419 scam has been around for years, a few years back we had our Autotrader site hacked, Most leads we have ever had! Amazed us that people were turning up to look at £3000 X5 BMW’s. As for the cars being HPI clear, the pictures are lifted from e-bay, Autotrader etc and are often private sales therefore less likely to be directly financed. I feel sorry for anyone that falls for any scan but alarm bells should always ring when payment is requested by Western Union.

I hate buying online from Bridgewater, have brought a couple of grade 2s that had the damage report been acurate I was have passed on. In regards the original post, don’t BCA only list panels if the paintwork is sub standard rather than it’s been painted (smart repairs mainly). Most of our clients cars end up at the block and many have had paint, some better than others.

I remember a client having a new seat cover under warranty. The Volvo dealer initially tried to say it might have been the drivers weight that caused the split, customer pointed out it was his wife’s car, told her what was said and sent her in. Not sure what was said but done under warranty! Was and guess is a real common fault and £100 is a great result.

As with many on here we sell a few retail used cars online but won’t deliver them unseen as there are to many smartarses and I know a dealer who got shafted when they changed distance selling rules and he had to take back a BMW where the buyer decided they did not like the colour after 10 days....

Has been very quiet for us compared to the last two years (Feb/Mar 2017 was mental due to VED changes). We have a couple of really busy days and then it goes dead. Also have a massive shopping list for nearly new cars and vans but just can’t find the stock (at the right prices). Am also finding moving mid range stock on near impossible as our trade buyers seem stocked up so just trying to retail out of it.

Best practice on something that needs to go to body shop anyway. A few years back we paid for one of our driver to go on a smart repair and dent course. I remember a Corsa he tried doing a PDR on the wing of. By the end of the day he had ending up painting the wing and door. I still don’t know why! Reminded me of this

Would they not go slightly newer? MFL have a few

We deal with main dealers quite a lot for new cars plus we buy quite a few late used and I am sure they are brainwashed the same way outside of the dedicated fleet departments. I find there are 3 types: - Arrogant, you are trade, we don’t have to deal with trade types, we are a main dealer don’t you know! - No idea how to deal with trade. No I don’t want a video, I don’t want to make an appointment to view, I don’t need a PCP quote. - slightly old school, talk you round the car, have a slight deal, job done in 10 minutes.

Traded an amazing R8 V10 that we have had on SOR for nearly a year, bit embarrassing when you have to re MOT a sale car. Probably the first car we have even had an enquiry on via Autotrademail for a long time.

We pay the extra and use our own base rate. It seemed very popular and we had quite a few applications, thinking about it I have not seen one for several months so need to check the base rate on the morning.

Have one due for a customer around March. I thought the dealer we use was joking when there was no discount, there are only a handfull of models that don’t have finance support terms and this is one.

Did a van last year that the buyer found on “News now” website who seemed to have scraped Autotrader adds as we never put it on there. We use Facebook for our leasing but our marketing guy looked at the analytics for Facebook post boasting and found a large number seemed to be overseas users despite him entering our set demographic.

Have done a few of these over the last couple of years. Early 2016 we were selling for overs then as cars came back we sold a couple to exporters for Malaysia, last couple were quite hard to shift and needed to be very well priced as the Northern Ford dealers seem to sell them very cheap. 5.0 V8 Auto Coupe is the best one but needs to have Custom pack. We did two cabs and one cab came back twice and both time took ages to go. Have also known of two cars having new engines under warranty plus lots of other smaller build quality issues.