James

Worst car buying experience, Leicester A

Worst car buying experience I have had in 30 years at Sytner Audi Leicester. Found a Q5 Edition 1 on Audi approved used website £43000 with 9k miles. Spoke with them over the phone and after negotiations with two of their sales team did a deal at £42500. I then get a phone call an hour later that they realised the car had been mis advertised and should have been £48000! They said they therefore could not honour the deal. I wrote to them expressing my disappointment at which stage they came back to me with another offer taking £2k off the price (now 46k), which with a bit of further negotiation on my PX price, we re agreed on a deal. I paid a deposit. I then went to source my own finance to make sure I had the funds available for the purchase, only to be refused as the car had a mark against it. I spoke with the sales team who informed me that as it was one of their fleet cars it had outstanding finance on, which couldn’t be cleared until they received it back at their dealership, which they couldn’t give a definitive date. Therefore I was in limbo on the finance, not knowing whether I would still secure the same rate when they finally cleared the mark. During this time I had raised that as the car was still in their fleet how would I know that the 9k mileage as advertised would not be massively exceeded while it was still out of their dealership. They advised verbally that they would think it was not likely go up more than 200miles, I requested the odometer reading, when this finally came through it was 11,300miles, 25% higher than advertised. I called the sales team to express my disappointment, where I was then pointed towards the small print in their contracts, not something at this stage I was really interested in hearing. I then stated I would not be proceeding as it just felt there was one dishonest fact after another, making me wonder what else was being hidden. My feedback would be that you only advertise used cars once they are back at your dealership so you have complete visibility of mileage and cleared of finance to avoid customers wasting a week of their time and left feeling disappointed. Back to the drawing board to hopefully find a more reputable dealer