Can I trust the main dealers when buying a used car?

pogofish

fantasyvn wrote: »

So, to put it another way, is a main dealer better than a car supermarket like Cargiant?

Hell... No....!

motorguy

pogofish wrote: »

Hell... No....!

Hell...... Yes....!

Cargiant etc tend to end up with the higher mileage, less pristine cars sold by people who have no clue about the brand whereas a main dealer car is more likely to have Full main dealer history, be dent / scratch / repair free and you'll be talking to people who know the brand.

Also moreoften the dealer can "talk" a bit on price.

IamNotAllowedToUseMyName

The answer is of course, it depends on the individual dealer. Some dealers can give really good deals because they have targets, and they need to hit volumes to get discounts. If they need to hit a target, it can be worth them buying some cars for themselves and registering them even though they then have to be sold as second hand.

So where dealers can do well is low mileage management cars and demonstrators. These cars will not generally have been abused, whereas ex-company car car-supermarket deals may have belonged to someone who knows they aren't going to keep the car for long and isn't interested in looking after it. Having said that, traffic conditions in the UK combined with the performance of most modern cars make it quite hard to abuse them through hard driving.

Also, when Motor Nation came on the scene, what, 20 years ago, what they were doing worked really well - they had good access to fleet cars (NatWest used to turn over cars after 3 or 4 months at one time because they bought at such a low price they could resell at a profit). These days there are lots of people copying the concept and I get the impression that the quality of the cars in the supermarkets have gone down. We got a 1 year old ex-Ford demonstrator Ford Explorer from Motor Nation in Brum about 15 years ago and were really happy with the price and the condition of the car (even though it had been off-roaded as a demonstrator). Before that we got a nice Vauxhall Cavalier 1.8iL auto from the Car Supermarket in Cannock Chase. Both buys were really easy and competitively priced, but that was 15-20 years ago and I think scammers have taken over the concept. Buying a car that is less than a year old from a supermarket makes for an easy deal. Buying an old car of unknown history -well what can any dealership really know about the future of that car?