Advice please about broken-down car

donglefan

A friend is in the following situation:

he drove his P reg VW Polo (1.6 petrol, mileage about 90k) into motorway services with engine seriously overheated and the power gave out just as he reached the services' car park.

A local garage picked up the car and said the engine had been so badly overheated due to pump failure, that a new engine would probably be needed and the car wasn't worth it. They advised him to give them the car for scrap.

The vehicle owner, who does not know a great deal about cars, agreed to scrap the car on their advice, and signed the DVLC scrap document and handed it over to the garage, along with the key and his payment for their towing (they didn't pay him anything for scrap.)

Once I heard about this I thought my friend needed a second opinion and I went back to the garage this afternoon; the car was still there, the garage closed. I left a letter asking them not to scrap it but to provide an estimate for repair.

Questions:

1. Am I being over-suspicious or could there be a slightly dodgy situation here?
2. As he signed the DVLC document, is it too late in any case?

tomstickland

Engine is probably wrecked, but replacement engines can be sourced for a few hundred and fitted in a day.
P reg 1.6 Polo is worth around £1200 I'd guess. So they had a point. He could rescue it for around £600-700 or less if he sources cheap engine.

donglefan

Thanks Tom.
Called the garage, they quoted £1000 for recon engine and £1000+ for labour and supply of connecting pipes and parts that have melted.
Not sure whether it's worth getting a second opinion.

rdwarr

I'd let it go - it's more than just the engine by the sound of it. There should have been some scrap value though - anything with an MOT will fetch a few quid on eBay.

reheat

I'm inevitably a bit suspicious of such things, but if the engine really was losing power it was very possibly close to siezing. I did this to my 1st car a long (far too long!) time ago, and melted half the white metal out the big ends - major overhaul. It niggles 'cos the garage will probably be able to sell bits off for spares. But on the other hand it saves your friend the aggro and cost of scrapping it, so possibly let sleeping dogs lie?

donglefan

Thank you. I think the engine probably did seize.

Another garage is suggesting a salvaged (not recon) engine for about 500 and they would charge 500 for installation.
Thank you for all the suggestions. It's a very close call. Hard to see a VW go for scrap, especially as he is pretty hard up.

Quinny_2

The car is 10 years old,and hardly worth the cost of the parts alone.

The fact that he has let them take it,saves him ringing aroud his local scrappy's,because now some scrap yards charge YOU,for taking a car away.

All to do with the enviroment would you believe.

Ken.

DavidHM

My local scrapyards are paying £30 collected or £50 for a car that drives there - the disposal costs haven't gone down but the price of steel has risen sufficiently to offset the increases that came in about five years ago.

I think it's a bit unfair that they didn't at least give him a discount for the car, and their quote was too high (by about 100%), but I'm not sure that I'd bother doing anything about it. By the time an alternative garage had been found and the cost of recovery to that cheaper garage had been paid, you'd be very, very close indeed to the car's value - if not even slightly over it.

I do think it's likely that a new engine would have been required once the power had given out. If he'd stopped on the hard shoulder, rather than trying to nurse it to the services, it might well only have been a new water pump for a couple of hundred.

So it's a shame but given that he's already in this situation, he's not likely to be able to improve upon it significantly. The situation is mildly dodgy and the garage may well have quoted higher than they needed to get the car, but as he's signed it over now there's so little in it for him that it's not worth the effort. I'd scrap the car and let the garage do what they want with it - possibly including fixing it themselves, but ultimately they can quote what they like.