The Saga of the Yorkshireman’s Car

I hope you have a spare half hour in which to read this long and sorry tale…

Well as you know the Yorkshireman has a new car. It is very big and incredibly very shiny.

True to form for us though, the running was not smooth when it came to acquiring the beast.

It all started when I was offered my job and we knew we could afford to take out a loan. The Yorkshireman knew exactly what he wanted, although most cars available were slightly out of our price range. After much time spent browsing Autotrader he found the perfect one, just the right price with all the right toys. It was even a nice colour. So he drove all the way to the edge of darkest Manchester to have a look at it. Having fallen in love, he put down a deposit.

All too easy we thought. Turns out we were right.

The car needed some work doing on it (the gear linkage, whatever that might be, needed replacing) so he was due to collect it the following week after the work had been done. Being a very clever and careful Yorkshireman he did an HPI check on the car during that week. Guess what! Go on, guess…….

The car was registered as stolen 😯

This was discovered late on a Saturday night, so on Sunday morning The Yorkshireman rang the garage. The bloke who answered seemed genuinely shocked to find out our news, he said that the car had been bought from a main dealer so as far as he was concerned it was Kosher. He said that he would look into it and get back to us.

He rang back on the Monday morning… and… The car had been reported stolen by the garage we were buying it from a few days earlier. It had been nicked from the workshop overnight after the key had been left in it. The guy that The Yorkshireman spoke to had no idea about this because he had just returned from holiday and he hadn’t spoken to anyone about it until the Monday as no-one had wanted to spoil his holiday with the news. However the office phone was forwarded to his mobile on the Sunday so he took The Yorkshireman’s original call.

Back to square one then.

The Yorkshireman started his hunt again, and found an identical car (not exactly the same car!). Off he went to have a look. This one was more expensive and had a slightly higher mileage so we were a bit reluctant to go ahead and we were beginning to wonder if we would find a deal as good as the original one.

Whilst pondering, he got a call from the original garage. The car had been found, undamaged, about 25 miles from where it was stolen. The gear linkage (whatever that might be) had rendered the car virtually undrivable so it had been abandoned. Unscathed. So we decided to go ahead with the original deal.

The key that was in the car when it was stolen was still missing, so we were given a cheque for a new one (over a hundred quid for a CAR KEY ffs – we got a copy of my little car’s key for substantially less than that, by a factor of about 10). We had to get the car booked into our local main dealer to get the key programmed which resulted in me, Little’un and the visiting Babies Everywhere and Babychair spending an hour sitting in a showroom. Not a place for a two-year-old and a two-month-old as I’m sure you can imagine. Babychair was very well behaved bit Little’un left sticky finger marks all over one of the cars.  Shame.

Anyway, back to the story… we finally got our hands on our shiny new car. The Yorkshireman took it out for a test drive (the gear linkage, whatever that might be, having been fixed) and we shook on the deal and left our old car behind.

Almost immedieately we noticed that the air conditioning wasn’t working. Apparently it’s fairly common for all the gas to escape from the aircon so we thought nothing of getting it regassed and all would be rosy. The car was also pulling left, easily fixed, a quick visit to Mr Tyre (how do they come up with these company names? Mr Tyre, I ask you) and some adjustment of tracking soon sorted that.

The aircon wasn’t so easy. When The Yorkshireman took it to be regassed it was discovered that there was a broken pipe somewhere in the system that needed replacing at a cost of a couple of hundred quid. He rang the garage we had bought the car from and asked if this would be covered by the warranty – unsurprisingly, the answer was a resounding “NO”. The garage did say they would try and press the warranty company to pay for the repair and that they would get back to him.

We waited. We waited some more. And we waited.

The Yorkshireman, being a very resourceful Yorkshireman indeed, rang East Midlands Trading Standards and asked them whether he had a case against the garage seeing as he had bought a car advertised as having aircon which turned out not to be working. They advised him to wave the Sale of Goods Act at the garage and tell them to pay the repair cost. He duly sent a snotty email and was told that we should make the repair and send the invoice back to the garage and they would reimburse him the cost.

So we have a very big, very shiny car that is now in full working order.

We are still waiting for the cheque though.

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