Update time…
The dealership was closed until yesterday morning (Tuesday the 3rd of Jan) so I spent a bit of time arming myself with the correct things to say and doing a bit more research on where I stood legally.
I rang Dave who runs the garage we normally use first thing yesterday morning and explained to him what was happening with the car and my suspicions about what was causing it. He said that going on his experience with those engines it very much sounded like a head gasket, obviously he couldn’t tell for certain but advised me to give the car back if possible. I’d already had a visual check around the engine bay and there was absolutely no sign of any leaks whatsoever and noting some of the comments above that was as far as I was prepared to go when it came to investigating things. It was eating through coolant and I don’t want any part in trying to put that right!
So onto the phone call at 9:15am yesterday and bearing in mind this:
I explained to him that I’d done about 300 miles in the car and it had emptied the expansion bottle out two or three times, that I wasn’t happy with the car and that I was going to reject it and ask for a refund.
He then said to me that it’s probably something simple like a leaking hose and that if I could get it back to him he could easily get that fixed for me.
I said no, and that I know a bit about cars and I’ve looked around it, parked it on a dry surface with the engine running and that there’s no signs of any leaks anywhere from any hoses or the radiator (I’d also noticed that the fuel economy and power was starting to drop which could well point to the engine losing compression, I didn’t mention that though because again, going on advice above it’s not up to me to try and diagnose things beyond what I was certain about).
So I said that I’m not satisfied with the condition of the car as I believe there’s something major wrong with it - potentially a head gasket, and that I’ve taken money out of our savings to buy it. This isn’t acceptable, I’ll have no way of knowing if the repairs you do will have been done to a standard I’d expect and basically I’ve lost faith in the car now anyway.
I’d like a refund please…
He said “Well we have the right to at least fix the car ourselves before you reject it.”
I said “No, and I don’t want particularly want to get legal about this but this where the law stands” and quoted this at him:
At that point he backed down and agreed to a full refund.
So the next thing was how to get the thing back up there with an engine fault? In the end I felt that it wasn’t worth the risk driving it because again as noted in one of the posts above - it was laying me open to blame if it boiled up or got worse on the way.
One of my best friends has a car trailer that’s been stored in a friends yard for a few months with his old Land Rover on it, so 8 o’clock this morning saw us trying to get a slightly seized Land Rover off the ramps and the Volvo onto it instead:
So that was that. Car returned, money back in the bank, some labouring time owed to Graham for driving me there and back (I also filled his car up), insurance cancelled minus £16 for the time the car was insured and some lessons learned along the way.
I’d like to thank all of you for taking the time to advise. It was really useful getting it down on here and being able to filter through what was the best likely way to go about dealing with what was a pretty stressful situation actually.
Maybe someone else might find this useful at some point and to be fair to the guy that sold it to me he was polite and professional in the end despite a little bit of back and forth at the start.
I can only say Phew really!
The dealership was closed until yesterday morning (Tuesday the 3rd of Jan) so I spent a bit of time arming myself with the correct things to say and doing a bit more research on where I stood legally.
I rang Dave who runs the garage we normally use first thing yesterday morning and explained to him what was happening with the car and my suspicions about what was causing it. He said that going on his experience with those engines it very much sounded like a head gasket, obviously he couldn’t tell for certain but advised me to give the car back if possible. I’d already had a visual check around the engine bay and there was absolutely no sign of any leaks whatsoever and noting some of the comments above that was as far as I was prepared to go when it came to investigating things. It was eating through coolant and I don’t want any part in trying to put that right!
So onto the phone call at 9:15am yesterday and bearing in mind this:
I explained to him that I’d done about 300 miles in the car and it had emptied the expansion bottle out two or three times, that I wasn’t happy with the car and that I was going to reject it and ask for a refund.
He then said to me that it’s probably something simple like a leaking hose and that if I could get it back to him he could easily get that fixed for me.
I said no, and that I know a bit about cars and I’ve looked around it, parked it on a dry surface with the engine running and that there’s no signs of any leaks anywhere from any hoses or the radiator (I’d also noticed that the fuel economy and power was starting to drop which could well point to the engine losing compression, I didn’t mention that though because again, going on advice above it’s not up to me to try and diagnose things beyond what I was certain about).
So I said that I’m not satisfied with the condition of the car as I believe there’s something major wrong with it - potentially a head gasket, and that I’ve taken money out of our savings to buy it. This isn’t acceptable, I’ll have no way of knowing if the repairs you do will have been done to a standard I’d expect and basically I’ve lost faith in the car now anyway.
I’d like a refund please…
He said “Well we have the right to at least fix the car ourselves before you reject it.”
I said “No, and I don’t want particularly want to get legal about this but this where the law stands” and quoted this at him:
At that point he backed down and agreed to a full refund.
So the next thing was how to get the thing back up there with an engine fault? In the end I felt that it wasn’t worth the risk driving it because again as noted in one of the posts above - it was laying me open to blame if it boiled up or got worse on the way.
One of my best friends has a car trailer that’s been stored in a friends yard for a few months with his old Land Rover on it, so 8 o’clock this morning saw us trying to get a slightly seized Land Rover off the ramps and the Volvo onto it instead:
So that was that. Car returned, money back in the bank, some labouring time owed to Graham for driving me there and back (I also filled his car up), insurance cancelled minus £16 for the time the car was insured and some lessons learned along the way.
I’d like to thank all of you for taking the time to advise. It was really useful getting it down on here and being able to filter through what was the best likely way to go about dealing with what was a pretty stressful situation actually.
Maybe someone else might find this useful at some point and to be fair to the guy that sold it to me he was polite and professional in the end despite a little bit of back and forth at the start.
I can only say Phew really!
