Just bought a car today, have a couple of questions

rev_henry

You should have a small slip from the V5 - the rest the dealer, er, deals with sending to DVLA.

I'm sure I saw something on watchdog a couple of years ago about failed focus instrument clusters so sounds legit. This means basically that all the dials you see before you in the drivers seat broke and needed replacing. If I'm thinking of the correct watchdog incident, dodgy circuit boards were to blame.

forgotmyname

Check the old MOT's and do a PROPER HPI check.

HPI, AA, RAC etc.. Not the cheap useless text checks.

property.advert

£1900 for a 2003 Focus with an iffy mileage is way OTT IMHO.

ashy_mashy

You should do a HPI check, I didn't know about HPI when I bought my car and currently fighting for it back.

http://www.hpicheck.com/

C_Mababejive

You know...i must have been lucky but I have never driven a vehicle which has suffered an instrument cluster failure. Neither has a member of my family and neither has anyone ever mentioned same happening to them. I used to have a Golf that was almost twenty years old and all its bits still worked. Guess this was the exception.

LandyAndy

The upside is that if the dealer has legitimately changed the instruments, they have told you in an open manner.

The downside is that you only have their word for it that the old instruments read 72k and not 172k and that's a difference that wear in the interior may well not show.

getmore4less

Intsrument panel, seats, door cards, steering wheel...........

It's easy to make a car look younger

maninthestreet

Unless there is further documentary evidence to support the 72K mleage the dealer claims the car has covered, I would walk away.
Or is the claimed actual mileage of the car now 72K + 19.9K = 91.9K??

macman

What mileage is declared on the bill of sale? if the mileage is not genuinely 71.3K and has been declared as such then you have a comeback.
But I don't undertand why you did not ask to inspect the previous MOT's to verify the mileage-2 minutes work. If not available, then I would have walked away. What does the service record say?
Isn't the time to ask these questions before buying, not after?

thegirlintheattic

The dealer declared the higher mileage so it is unlikely to be iffy. Although check the MOT history just to be sure.

As long as you have the little green V5 slip - the rest of the V5 can be sorted by the dealer.