In the old backroom archive I posted about a friend of mine who was having driveability problems with the above car. After issuing an ultimatum my friend persuaded Vauxhall to take back the car in exchange for a new 1.6 (my friend having no confidence in the 1.8 by now).
There is a sequel to this story. Out of the blue my friend received a phone call from a gentleman in another part of the country. He had bought the same car used from another Vauxhall dealer. He asked my friend if she had any problems with the car. My friend asked "what sort of problems", and he said "it doesn't drive very well!" My friend then told the gentleman the full story. He is getting back to the dealer absolutely furious. It would appear the dealer picked up the car in all good faith from the Vauxhall dealer computer. I often wondered what happened to rejected cars!
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..I agree. In 1999 I bought my wife a used year-old 10,000 mile Vauxhall Corsa 1.4 Automatic from a Vauxhall dealer. It was purchase under the Vauxhall NetworkQ quality system that included a 102-point pre-sale check. On driving the car home The automatic transmission would "flare" (when shifting between 2nd and 3rd gear the transmission would select a false neutral for a few seconds, and the engine revs would increase upto 3500 RPM. The fault only got worse. On getting the car home I found the oil dipstick stuck in the oil tube; although the dipstick handle is plastic there was so much rust on the oil tube it was jammed in.
Needless to say I took the car back to the dealer immediately for a full refund. They has never even road tested the car, let alone checked the oil.
I would never go to a Vauxhall dealer ever after that.
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I've had totally opposite experience of the Network Q system. I'm on my second Vectra estate, both Network Q cars and each has been delivered in absolutely immaculate condition and in first rate mechanical order. Furthermore, the few problems which have developed have been dealt with efficiently and speedily, no questions asked. I can't speak highly enough of my local Vauxhall dealer and when a crankshaft bearing sensor failed on my present 2.0 CDX, in the north of Scotland - I live in Worcestershire - the service manager of the Vauxhall agency in Inverness bent over backward to fit a new one to enable me to drive South the next day, even though he already had a full workload. What's more, he accepted my word that the car was still under warranty, (all my documentation was at home) allowing me to drive it away without checking with my local dealer until the following day and this was a £98 job!
I suppose it's all down to the individual dealer and I, touch wood, seem to have struck lucky.
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What shocks me about this story is that Vauxhall themselves have allowed a reject car back into their own dealer network. I used to buy Vauxhall cars until recently because I have had excellent service from a smallish rural dealer 5 minutes drive from where I
live. Unfortunaley a large multi-garage chain bought them out in order to close them down. They opened a large glitzy expensive site 35 minutes drive away. I hate this kind of operation where the customer is just a number, so I moved on to Honda which has a smaller dealer 15 minutes away.
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