Daughter's decided it's new car time, so been looking on Autotrader today for a new set of wheels. Found one she liked so just for a laugh tried the "Part exchange your car" scheme, filled in the details, clicked "Send to the dealer" and waited. The price Autotrader came back with was reasonable at £1300, and 5 minutes later the phone rang. "Wide boy dealer" starts off with a few questions then "Come in and have a chat!" He's 250 miles away...

 

So we convinced him that wasn't going to happen, and then he quotes a part ex price of £500...

 

Told him we were interested in finance, and he jumped straight into pcp speak until he was told in no uncertain terms that it wasn't going to be pcp, but hp only. Then he "juggled some figures" and came back with a fairly reasonable payment scheme and would we confirm a purchase right there and then. We asked if he could email the figures over so we could have a look at them in detail, and he told us he couldn't as it was a weekend deal only, and he couldn't guarantee the deal for tomorrow, but he read them out again so we could write them down, and we left it at that. He promised to call back in an hours time to have another chat though.

 

Sounds a bit pushy to me.

i think, maybe 10 years ago, if the dealer gave you the figures on paper then they were responsible for them. If they only read them out and you wrote them down, they are not responsible for honoring them as you could have made a mistake. That might still apply and be why he'd wouldn't email them.

Exactly. If they're selling finance then there ought to be a paper trail. No one with half a brain agrees to finance without having seen the relevant documents supporting the dealers bull****.

I dipped my toes into this Autotrader valuation when it first appeared to assist in PX trading. However, in my initial trial I found that most dealers were very negative with figures provided by Autotrader. Has it improved,somehow I doubt it very much,as we know dealerships are known to be lowering PX values on used , to maintain their sizeable margins. 15%plus on used resale above trade-in value.