Right to reject car that breaks down every week?

vancreef

To quote Trading Standards;
The customer has the right to reject a vehicle within 30 days without any attempt of repair from the manufacturer.
After 30 days the manufacturer has one chance to repair the fault.. Should the same fault reoccur after the repair the customer then has the right to reject the vehicle.
Toyota's argument so far is that "none of the faults (2 replaced EGR Valves, 2 loose wires, 2 loose pipes, 1 replaced ECU) are manufacturing defects." Yet they continue to repair the vehicle under a warranty that only covers manufacturing defects. The whole point of me buying a diesel was to save money on running costs, but having to make 2 x 20 mile round trips to my local dealer every week to drop the car off and then collect it several days later are not saving me anything, especially when they ask that I return the courtesy car with the same amount of fuel as when I took it, yet the last time I dropped off my car for repair with half a tank of diesel in it, when I picked it up it was running on fumes and dirty from them driving it around. The Service advisor had literally used it for his own purpose for several days in order to "test it".

KeithP

Vancreef, what was the response to the email you sent on 31 July to TFS?

vancreef

So far we've only had a verbal response from TFS which was "we need to make it absoultely clear that we will not allow you to return the vehicle, and don't want you to get your hopes up".
In writing.....nothing so far because every time we take it in they use the latest breakdown as an excuse to delay their final response. They have had my car for around a month now and I am due to collect it tomorrow.
What Toyota keep saying is "It's fixed now", which in their minds is case closed. They're simply not listening to us when we keep saying "we want to reject the vehicle".

vancreef

The other problem we have at the moment is that TGB are telling us that it is nothing to do with them as we bought the car through TFS, but TFS are saying that their hands are tied because it is TGB that are instructing them to reject our right to return the vehicle.
They are just time wasting.

vancreef

Well we went down the route of contacting the Financial Ombudsman and I have to say that I was appalled with their service. It took approx 8 weeks for them to look at our case, which we expected, at which point they made the decision that they would uphold our claim to reject the vehicle. "Brilliant" we thought, except when we contacted them the day after they said that they had changed their mind!
This was based on the fact that our accounts of the repairs to the vehicle did not match Toyota's.
It turns out that Toyota have lied about the number of repairs that were carried out on our car by leaving out some of the repeat repairs. It was due to the fact that these were repeat repairs that legally gave us the right to reject it. They've also fabricated some nonsense excuse as to why the cruise control isn't working correctly, which is that it is "supposed" to switch off when the car is doing an exhaust re-gen. This may well be the case but the reason I call it nonsense is because when I first reported this to them they knew of no reason what so ever for the car to be behaving this way. They have now had the car in their possesion for 2 months and have test driven it on several occassions, claiming that there is nothing wrong with it as the cruise control is not switching off. But hang on a minute; isn't it "suppposed" to?
I am now at the stage where I want to take this to a solicitor and wanted to know if anything has any recommendations?

Fosterdog

Do you have any paperwork to show what repairs have been carried out? Any paperwork to show that it has been booked in with them for repair?

vancreef

Fosterdog wrote: »

Do you have any paperwork to show what repairs have been carried out? Any paperwork to show that it has been booked in with them for repair?

Hi Fosterdog,
Unfortunately not, as all work carried out was under warranty.
It wasn't until the Ombudsman contacted me to discuss this that I noticed that Toyota had left out some of the instances. I contacted the dealership to question this and the service manager read back every single instance of repair that he had submitted to the system they used, which Toyota Finance has full access to. The only reason for the missing information was that Toyota Finance knowingly withheld it. I asked the service manager for a copy of all the repairs, but he refused because he didn't want to get involved.