Thanks Tony - I agree 100% with your summary. The car is on standard 3 year 60K mile lease.

This is almost exactly what I have tried to do, recorded delivery letters, email with read receipts etc. However, the lease company just cannot deal with it. This is why despite rejecting the vehicle over a year ago, I still have it.

Some highlights along the way:

Lucy BC (remember her) advised me on this forum that I could not just stop paying the lease as this would be breach of contract so I had to go via the complaints process.

The lease was arranged as a 6+30 so for the last six months there were no payments which reduced the effectiveness of stopping paying anyway.

Mr Luther (:-) told me that if I stopped paying the lease they would snatch the car back.

If you call Mr Luther you will get put through to the RAC who will attend your vehicle and charge you £120 for this if you are on a non maintenance contract. They will also try and charge you for any bits they fit, even if these would be covered under the VW warranty.

If you speak to the accounts department, you will never speak to that person again as they mysteriously leave the company between phone calls!

If you hand back the vehicle early they will only agree to refund 50% of the remaining lease payments. This is obviously not enough to pay for a hire car.

If you speak to the accounts department or the vehicle downtime team they will tell you things which are not true.

For example:

1. The contract is with the broker.

Actually I think that anything the broker tells you is legally binding on the Lease company as they are acting as an agent (usual authority I believe it is legally defined as).

2. The vehicle must be returned with a MOT.

3. The vehicle must be returned in a saleable condition.

My only success is that I got all of the RAC callouts and parts charges refunded by the bank. These refunds caused Mr Luther to cancel the DD arrangement. I then managed to get the accounts department to waive these charges formally and agree let me keep £500 back in exchange for settling the outstanding lease amounts. This stopped the threat of snatchback and in the meantime I campaigned for my legal rights of rejection.

The icing on the cake was when the downtime team told me to take the car to VW for a check (I was experiencing misfires with specific brands of fuel) before the 60K mileage limit was reached. This I did and the car was pronounced OK, which it was at the time. Less than 2500 miles later it started misfiring again and VW would not provide a loan or hire car while they looked at the problem as there was no fault found on the previous visit!

Edited by zango on 09/04/2012 at 20:42

Hi Tony, thanks for the replies.

The car goes back tomorrow about 18 days early. I rejected the car back in March 2011, but the lease company did not answer any of my correspondence until September 2011. By this time we were pretty much into the 6 month no pay period, so handing the car back or stopping payment would not have been effective as you say.

I agree entirely with your summation that a contract requires both sides to contribute (consideration) for it to be binding. The lease company do not agree and actually told me that I have to pay for the car whether it works or not and that their only obligation was to deliver the vehicle on the specified start date.

I have read the BVRLA dehire guide, but note that this is not referenced in the contract.

Suffice to say I won't be paying any de-hire charges and will be raising my own invoice for loss of use (47 days) when the vehicle was off the road and diminution in value for (50% of the hire fee for 1 year) for the time I was forced to use a vehicle that was not fit for purpose. I expect that I am going to have to go to the small claims court to recover this. I was just wondering is the BVRLA offer an arbitration / complaint service as an alternative?

Perhaps the Financial Services Ombudsman would be happy to take an interest in this?