Was at local Audi dealer looking at a lovely A4 Cabriolet, recently offered for sale...
Test drive went well, part-ex discussions seemed tough, but then I do have a well-used 12-year old BMW 318!
Salesman hinted that if my figure was accepted would we have a deal and I said yes. Even though he was a senior salesman he went away to speak to some 'Mr Big' character.
Came back a full ten minutes later to say there had been a mistake with the price and it was actually two thousand pounds more!! He showed me a stock printout confirming this and blamed a minion who must have confused his fives with his sevens when putting a price display on it.
I walked away of course as the car was now only a few grand off the price of a new car, despite being 18 months old.
Has this happened to anyone else, and did I do the right thing?
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Unless the p/x price was insane, you did the right thing. What specs were you looking at changing to/from, and for how much?
You can't force them to give you the car for that amount of money, but it sounds like sharp practice to me - a bait and switch. Perhaps it was the same car that TiredEyes put down a £1k deposit on?
www.broadspeed.com would get you a 3.0, 2wd, 2 door manual for under £28k, and a 1.8t for £23,273 so (I'm guessing) £27,995 doesn't sound like much of a deal unless it was a spec to die for with a ridiculous amount offered for the p/x (£3k+).
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Unless the p/x price was insane, you did the right thing. What specs were you looking at changing to/from, and for how much? You can't force them to give you the car for that amount of money, but it sounds like sharp practice to me - a bait and switch. Perhaps it was the same car that TiredEyes put down a £1k deposit on? www.broadspeed.com would get you a 3.0, 2wd, 2 door manual for under £28k, and a 1.8t for £23,273 so (I'm guessing) £27,995 doesn't sound like much of a deal unless it was a spec to die for with a ridiculous amount offered for the p/x (£3k+).
It was an 03 2.5TDi Sport A4 Cabriolet with auto box. other extras included alcantara/leather trim, metallic paint, electric seats, wood trim, Supaguard. Had a rear scrape and a broken grille which were to be sorted of course. The car new would be £32k before discounts.
Nice spec - I wanted a two grand p/ex/reduction for my clean car with fsh (CAP-based valuation on Wheeler Dealer website said it was booked at £2593).
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Okay, apart from the alacantara (nice) and wood trim (not nice!) £28k is pretty much what Broadspeed wants for a new, UK supplied one in metallic. Electric seats add nothing to the value of a used car, the wood may actually detract from it, and the Supaguard is of questionable value. I'm not convinced I would order the sport trim on my own car, if I were in the market, but obviously some people do like the harder suspension and bigger wheels - although this is such a cruiser. Tiptronic and diesel are good though.
The p/x valuation sounds seriously optimistic for a saloon but then I can't imagine that CAP would book it at anything like that either.
Assuming you're talking about a cabrio, then £3,500 sounds like a fair private sale value and so a low £2k p/x offer would hardly be generous, though not utterly unreasonable if the margin were tight.
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Broken grille and scrape on the back? Sounds like a pretty careless previous owner and I'd be wondering what else was wrong with it that wasn't so obvious (engine damage caused by not being bothered to keep the oil topped up properly is one thing that springs to mind with a VW/Audi TDI engine).
If they can't even give you the right price for the car, it doesn't inspire much confidence in their ability to do other things right. In your position I would have done exactly the same, and probably warned people off them, too.
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i did mention that they paid that £1k back didnt i? well £1080, £80 for small claims cost.
anyway, i wouldnt touch audi with a bargepole, not with their reliability issues, attitude & overpricing.
i am really worried about audi dealers, are they all con artists?
scary stuff.
go look at a saab cab, 5-7K cheaper and all the fun.
2.0T Auto tiptronic does 43 mpg. same as audi cab 2.5tdi.
i did look at 2,5tdi audi cab, but thought wots the point of having a sexy car to look at, but listen to its engine and wish i had had a quiet petrol.
glad i had petrol.
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OP: Go past there again, and see if they have corrected the price, if not ask them why not. If they don't play ball inform trading standards.
Vtiredeyes: I don't know the history of your smallclaims, can you enlighten me please?
---
was kev_is_here
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www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?t=21014
if you have a spare half hour to read
then ending here
www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?t=22495
happy reading ;-)
(btw, best £80 i ever spent, sometimes wish i had just said "see you in court")
but it all turned out well in the end.
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OP: Go past there again, and see if they have corrected the price, if not ask them why not. If they don't play ball inform trading standards.
Yes, they put the 'revised' sticker price up minutes after I walked away.
What disappointed me most was their arrogance. There was no apology at all, they literally just said there had been a mispricing and the car was now £2k more. I thought they might have offered something in return for their mistake, like a year's road tax etc...
Instead, they were supremely confident it would sell within hours - despite a few other folk before me not buying.
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My experience of Audi was around two and half years ago. Went in looking for a nearly new A4. The experience started OK, until they offered £3000 for a two year old Mondeo and said they were doing me a favour. I walked out in disgust. The sales manager then rang me every day for a week trying to talk me into buying a new A4 on a PCP, which would have cost me around £25000. This, despite my max budget being around £13000. I went across the road and bought a Passat instead. But that's another story and an even bigger mistake!!
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Sorry about your experience.
There are honest ones out there though. When we bought my wife's Almera from the main dealer in Bristol, there were two side by side, same mileage and age, a red one at 9995 and a dark green one at 8995. We went for the green one, and started the deal. Then the salesman went off and behind the scenes we heard a lot of shouting. This ended with the salesman coming out of the office saying "well it's too late now, they've seen the price". So they honoured the price without us saying a word!
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Well, so much for the Audi saleman's optimism...
A friend just rang the dealership up a few minutes before closing time today and asked whether it was still for sale.
They said it was, and would he like a test drive early next week - the earlier the better just in case it sells!
That'll learn 'em :-)
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I had this problem with main dealer websites when buying a used car. VW lupo advertised on web as a very high spec S when really standard spec E. Dealer only wanted to drop a couple of hundred. Then I was told two lies about the car (relating to service history and number of owners) in the space of ten minutes - walked out.
Toyota website had higher sticker price on a car than on the web (difference of £500), when informed of this, they checked the website and honoured the price on the website as the starting point of the negotiation.
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I'll tell you what annoyed me on a similar note. In the free car ads paper that you find outside the likes of Tesco there was a used car sales company based in Bristol. They like to be UNspecific in their ad saying Audi A4 Avant S reg from 4000 and Omega T reg Elite Sallon from 5000, they do this with all their cars. Really annoying but at least you expect it to be true.
I went one week and found the cars weren't there. No problem, a couple of days later the new edition of the paper comes out - with the same prices, I'm in Bristol again and drop by, no cars at that price. I go home and the third week in arow there the prices are again! As luck would have it I was in Bristol again, same story no cars at the advertised price. I grab a salesman and he says they must have been sold, I explained the situation, that I had seen 3 issues with the same prices and that I had been here 3 times, in 3 weeks. He fobbed me off with rubbish about printing times. And so I asked to see this weeks coming ad he said the guy who does the ads wasn't working today.
I wanted to report them to Bristol Trading Standards but I never did.
*prices are not accurate just for illustration.
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Advertising Standards Agency is what you want. www.asa.org.uk.
Companies have been done for advertising things that don't exist before, if you make a complaint to the ASA it is up to them to prove that they did indeed have cars available at the advertised prices.
mike
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Happened to me once - I was trying to buy a second-hand Merc SLK from a large (Jaguar) dealer near me.
Agreed a price to change with my part-ex of 19k and shook on it. Salesboy then goes to fill in the paperwork and it has a price to change of 21k. Thankfully eagle-eyed girlfriend spotted this just before I signed. Salesboy goes away and comes back and says "Sorry, 24,999's the price [that was the screen price], take it or leave it".
The other salesbloke sat next to salesboy agreed with us that he had heard 19k as the agreed price to change but we walked rather than argue over it.
mike
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