Jason F

Avoid!! Worst "car dealer" we have ever

It's difficult to know where to start without writing for days about how appalling A5 Motor Group are. My Wife and I wanted to buy a Range Rover Sport as we have 2 small children and thought this an ideal, safe family car. We scoured AutoTrader for a couple of weeks and unfortunately found A5 Motor Group. We went to view the vehicle we were interested in and it was not as described. It is obvious now that they use filters on the images they take, as the cars look far better online than in person. Any way, at this stage we looked around the car, took it for a drive and found a number of things wrong with it but it was an 8 year old car with reasonably high mileage and the owner of the business (Matt) could not have been more helpful. He agreed to get everything done for us, so (with some trepidation) we left a £1000 cash deposit. We were told the work would take around 2 weeks. This is as good as it got. From this point on customer service was completely absent. We chased and chased only to be given excuses each time as to why the car wasn't ready. If we managed to speak to Matt, we were told he needed to speak to Charlie, if we managed to speak to Charlie we were told he needed to speak to Matt. We were made promises that weren't followed through on and the final straw was the cars service history. When we viewed the car I asked about the full service history and we were told that they didn't have a stamped service book as they were waiting for this to come from the supplying dealer. Instead we were shown a print out of the supposed service history of the car, which I pointed out was missing a couple of services. I guess at this point we should've walked away but you kinda get suckered in. I made it very clear, however, that we would not conclude the sale without the fully stamped service book. Once the car was apparently ready (it was supposed to have 12 months MOT but I checked online and this had not been done) I asked again about the service book. We were told it had not been found, so they had ordered a replacement. After another week the replacement service book arrived and we were supplied with images of each page. At this stage it was obvious to me that they had filled this in themselves, as it was in Matt's hand writing with his signature and no dealer stamps, so basically no proof of any servicing. We were told that the supplying dealer had filled it in and sent it to them. We asked who that was and were told by Matt that he needed to ask Charlie. In a later conversation with Charlie we were told he needed to ask Matt. I then spoke to Land Rover customer service to see what information they had on the car. As it was before 2013 they told me there were no digital records, so the only way to prove service history was to speak to each dealer who serviced the car. I was also informed that anyone can buy a blank replacement service book and fill it in themselves but they (Land Rover) and their dealers would not fill out such a document. So, another lie and for us this was the final straw. It then took us over a week of messages and calls before our deposit was refunded. At one point my Wife and I were taking it in turns to speak to Charlie and Matt as they were constantly calling and being abusive on the phone. At one point Charlie even called my Wife a c**t. Completely unacceptable. There's so much more we could write about our dealings with A5 Motor Group but if you're still reading, then like me you must be getting bored by now as it's all too similar to other bad reviews. Speaking of which, I would take the content of any 5 star reviews with a punch of salt, as most of them are written by themselves. If you need proof look back to June on their AutoTrader reviews, at which point they'd had numerous bad reviews, only to see that on 12th June they have 9 x 5 star reviews to boost their score, pathetic A5 Motor Group.