eBay has long been established as the place to find dreadfully advertised cars however I reckon Autotrader is catching it up.

Ok so they can't use block capital large red font to highlight blatant lies but basic grammar and spelling appear to be taking a nose dive.

Autotrader also fools you by autopopulated the begnning of the text.

Take an advert for a Saxo 1.5D i have just stumbled across (no it wasn't what i was actually looking for! I haven't gone completely mad)

116,000 miles,

3 Door Hatchback,

Blue,

Diesel,

Manual.

power steering

electric windows

air bag

central locking

good start

no mot good enigan i am salling repeaire or speaire

Uh-oh!

Can we assume that an uneducated generation has got old enough to start selling cars?

Or people are letting their toddlers type up their adverts?

Or is it the influx of people for who English is not their first language?

Either way how do people expect to ever sell a car with langauge like that?

The standard of spelling and grammar has taken a dive in general, you see it a lot on forums, FB, eBay etc etc.

Da cellar is an ejut!

wat u meen!!?!?!!?!? dat saxo iz wel gud. if i ad jub i bi it and krooze it. innit

Ahem, that was me 'keeping it strictly hustler' or so I'm led to believe.

I love finding terrible adverts on eBay and autotrader, these people have absolutely no idea about anything generally and should be avoided.

I phoned one guy recently about a used car and I asked him if the cambelt had been done to which he replied 'Nah mate, engine is all sound nothing has every gone wrong with (obviously pronounced wiv) the cambelt' when I told him it was a good thing he assured me that it would have been done...

The problem with the internet is that is has given idiots a way to convey themselves to the masses.

Previously this was reserved for people who could pay for newspaper space and had an editor to filter out the stupidity.

Edited 25 June, 201015 yr by cheezemonkhai

I think Autotrader needs to do some serious work tidying up listings as I've found it very annoying having to use it extensively over a few months when trying to find a car. What really bugged me is the deliberate misuse of fields - many will put '89' for mileage when it's 89,000 so if you search for cars with less than 40,000 miles all these high mile cars you're avoiding come up. Some of them keyword spam so that all their cars will come up in searches when in reality none of the cars from that dealer matched the search. I'd like to be able to refine searches by bhp as well because diesel cars will frequently offer similar capacities for many of the cars in the range making it difficult to separate out the higher performance models.

On the plus side though their automatic alerts work well and that's how I got my Octavia.

John

The standard of spelling and grammar has taken a dive in general, you see it a lot on forums, FB, eBay etc etc.

Get a few like this on Briskoda as well now, shall I retire?

I find it even more annoying as every computer now has at least a spell checker if not a grammar checker as well.

Im on a Mac and as I type this if I spell anything wrong it gets underlined in red!

I know I'm not perfect all the time but at least I try.

It echoes the general poor standard of people as a whole. We employ people at work and as a whole there are very few who have a good work ethic. You always can tell which people they are as they are the ones who do not care wether spelling or grammar are correct working on an "It'll do" philosophy.

Tom