Tag Archives: rip off

Buying a car in tears…

Screenshot-4A recent Inside Out South on BBC TV featured a lady who had a nasty car shopping experience involving an unscrupulous car dealer in Hampshire.

Her husband suffers from dementia, they drove a smart and immaculate low mileage 59 plate Citroen C3 and they’d been tempted by a VIP invitation to attend a car showroom sales event. No harm in that, surely?

When they got there the wife was sufficiently impressed by the promotion to say she was interested in a new car and to pay £1000 deposit towards a new car. I didn’t catch the model concerned.

A little later on, the car in question was delivered to her door. It wasn’t new, it had higher mileage than her C3 and there were considerable signs of wear and tear. It looked much worse than her own car. Needless to say she said she wasn’t happy and didn’t want to buy this. “Can I have my money back?”

Out came the verbal thumbscrews.

“You said you wanted this.” “I got this car specially for you.” “The deposit is non refundable”… as this unscrupulous salesman digs in for his commission here.

Then we heard about the price. A car that was worth £4240 as a trade price had been valued at £2700 when used in part exchange. A £1500 rip off and that’s before they marked it up on their website to £5800. Outrageous.

Happily she had family to turn to (often they don’t) and presumably the son or daughter alerted Jon Cuthill at the BBC. Needless to say, in the face of this publicity, the dealer admitted defeat, said they would not take things further and gave the lady her money back.

She’d learned a big lesson. Don’t pay a deposit for a car you haven’t seen. Or when you’ve got a perfectly nice and fairly new one…

Stress had taken its toll of course. Nobody gets compensation for feeling daft.

“I never thought I’d buy a car in tears.”

“I wake up in the morning and wish this would go away.”

“I’m scared they’ll come and take our car away.”

“It completely ruined a special anniversary.”

But as the likes of consumer programmes know, to get the customer out of tricky situations like this often involves promising not to tell others the name of the business. That’s what irritates me most because I fervently believe in naming and shaming – especially in an industry where salesman don’t have to be licensed to sell us cars ethically. And where too many salesmen are totally unprincipled here, targeting vulnerable ladies as was the case here.

Yes, we’ve had to remove public blogs to get members a settlement too… but only after we’ve told local ladies the facts and who the offender was. This is what we do within the Club after giving a business time to put things right where possible.

If the business doesn’t budge and clearly doesn’t care, we award them Red Cards and keep poking them via blogs like this and using social media. I wish I knew the car dealer in Hampshire that used such bully-like tactics here. I’d be delighted to give them a good poke today…

FOXY

Why are women rip off targets by some garages?

woman_ventingIt’s never good news when you read what seems to be a case of a garage attempting to rip-off a female.

And tackling a female that knew more about tyres than the Kwik-Fit fitter in this instance.

Being charitable, perhaps he was a new member of staff, doing his best?

Not realising that £360 to fix a puncture was a tad outside the customer’s expectation .

But at worst this was a cynical ploy to exploit a motorist who just happened to be female and motoring savvy.

And therein lies the difficulty because female motorist perceptions are such that we imagine this sort of thing happens more often than it does. Although this IS an industry where it does…

The Ripple Effect

When I set up FOXY 11 years ago I did so because I was horrified to think that any Tom, Dick or Joanna could set up a garage and profess to know what they were doing when my brakes needed sorting. Or that I’d be sold expensive tyres when I didn’t need them. My stepdaughter had been well and truly ripped off by a garage rogue and showed no remorse when we tackled him together…

So I wanted to identify the genuinely good garages from the mediocre and worse, requiring the ones we promoted to women to sign the FOXY Promise to ‘never overcharge, patronise or sell motoring services they don’t need.’

The majority of UK garages would never do this I feel sure but that isn’t the point. The point is that too many women think they WILL be ripped off and, despite their independence, numbers and wealth, feel very uncomfortable in macho garage environments. This results in too many women not getting their tyres checked as often as they should and not going to garages to get their cars serviced as often as they should.

So their cars aren’t as well maintained or as safe as they should be – and could be dangerous as a consequence.

And many good garages are missing out on this business, because local ladies don’t realise they have a FEMALE CHOICE.

Sadly some fast-fit businesses cannot sign the FOXY Promise because they pay their staff minimum wages, knowing they will respond to a sales campaign to sell specific services and products to earn commission. So, in a nutshell, some motor industry businesses WILL sell motorists services they don’t need. Female and male customers alike. I do not like this…

FOXY Lady Approved standards

Any FOXY Lady Approved garage joins our network on the basis of FOXY’s pre-determined minimum standards. This could be one of the following – a listing on the IMI Professional Register, a Chartered Trading Standards Institute Code of Practice scheme and other evidence of being better than the rest.

Our standards are based on quality, value for money, cleanliness and customer service although some are more modest than others, to keep prices down. Otherwise this wouldn’t be a FOXY Choice. In addition to an initial compliance visit, we expect all garages to provide a minimum level of good female feedback each year to secure their network place. Most do this easily.

I would rather not comment further about Kwik-Fit other than to say that I honestly think they are working hard to up their game. There will always be weak links in a massive organisation and, providing Kwik-Fit acts upon this negative feedback then that will surely strengthen their internal culture?

But will they be given time to change their spots without changing their brand name? The minute there is a bad story (and where do sensationalist headline hunters head for to get one?) the same old bile is unleashed again from motorists and trade professionals alike. And bad news reflects on us all.

Buying cheap garage services is a risky option

Another risky area in the motor industry is to do with comparison websites and garage brokers who market what they do on the basis of price. We are all conditioned to compare prices and buy the cheapest insurance, and or goods on supermarket shelves. But in an unregulated motor industry where servicing check-lists can easily be ticked (without the check-list ticks being checked ie sometimes the ticked jobs haven’t been done) how can it make sense to buy cheap? When you could be up-sold expensive services (like £360 for a puncture perhaps?) or not realise when safety corners have been cut.

A lady I spoke to yesterday thought she was being ripped off because her MOT garage tried to sell her a car service after 3 years of not having one. I was able to explain that the MOT doesn’t look after her potentially expensive and neglected engine – she then realised that these are complementary nor competing checks and her garage was simply being honest and transparent. But she didn’t know enough to realise this at the outset…

Finally, another area we should all be wary of is when you buy via a garage broker ie you pay a central organisation without knowing which garage (or their credentials) will eventually repair your car. Obviously a broker has negotiated a cheap price to add his cut on top, before selling to you. Yes, you might get your car collected and returned to your doorstep after car servicing, but you mightn’t know how to check the work they have – or haven’t done.

I could write a lot more because this is my subject but I think I’ve probably said enough. So perhaps it’s sufficient to round up by saying…

Here’s how to steer clear of bad garages (and help other motorists)

1) Join the Club and see what else we do here.

2) Help us do a better job in future by posting recent garage feedback here, good, bad or indifferent, for us to share. If you are female and the business is a FOXY Lady Approved one you’ll get a free Club membership (online lifetime one) as a thank you from the business, for your time and comments.

3) If you want to see where your nearest FOXY Lady Approved business is, follow these links.

To see your nearest FOXY Lady Approved tyre service (tyres, wheels, that sort of thing)

To see your nearest FOXY Lady Approved garage/repairer/car dealer for any MOT, servicing and/or repair work.

And by all means call the office on 01903 879988 for more details if we can help you.

FOXY

PS: Here’s the link to the offending Kwik-Fit story if you’ve read this far.

UK garages charge women more for car repairs

car-repairs-at-rip-off-garagesBritish women are charged an average of £45 more than men for car repairs, an investigation by ClickMechanic has found. ClickMechanic, the online marketplace for car repairs, examined independent car garages across the UK and found that a standard repair costing a man £571 will typically cost a woman £616, an increase of 8%.

Male and female mystery shoppers requested quotes to replace the clutch of a 2011 Ford Focus from 182 garages across ten UK cities. The investigation found that eight out of the ten cities charged women a ‘female premium’ and only 6% of the surveyed garages gave a consistent quote to both male and female customers.

“For every female car-owner in the UK this report will come as an unwelcome surprise,” says Andrew Jervis, Co-founder and CEO of ClickMechanic. “While the vast majority of mechanics strive to provide honest and reliable quotes, these results show that there is a worrying minority of garages failing to do so. There is a desperate need across the industry for transparency and consistency in price in order to establish trust with consumers of both sexes.”

Birmingham repair garages charged the highest female premium at 31%, closely followed by Manchester (28%) and Glasgow (20%). Only two out of the ten surveyed cities bucked the trend and charged men more for a repair, with Sheffield and Edinburgh garages quoting males 5% and 19% more than females respectively.

The investigation uncovered some price-hiking across the country, regardless of the customer’s gender. On average, garages quoted both men and women £594 to carry out the work, £80 more (16%) than the £514 recommended by industry standard guidelines provided by car manufacturers, parts providers and trade bodies.

“Customers, both male and female, rely on mechanics to be accurate with their pricing. We recently carried out a study that found roughly half of people (45%) have no idea how much common repairs on an average household car should cost. While there is a small number of cowboys taking advantage of the fact that most consumers just don’t know how much their car repairs should cost, most mechanics are reliable and trustworthy. These results should therefore encourage the car repair industry to focus its efforts on making sure mechanics have the best possible tools in place to provide reliable quotes.”

FOXY COMMENT:

This survey confirms what we have suspected for ages but couldn’t prove. And few believed us. Clearly there is no excuse for price-hiking of any kind with the technology available to tell garages how long a job should take. All they have to do is add the cost of the parts they choose (that’s another area for discussion) and their labour rate which includes their profit presumably.

Why can’t the motor industry be more professional here? Yet again it’s the few cowboys letting the majority good guys down and doing untold damage to the industry’s reputation in women’s minds.And in so doing the women steer clear of garages when they should be using them more, not less, from a safety point of view.

Nothing short of regulation will do the trick we say, especially if one of the unintended consequences of this report is to encourage women to choose cheap repair quotes in future, regardless of whether he/she is licensed or not…

guestreviewThis is a Guest Blog from ClickMechanic, an online marketplace making it quick and easy for drivers to get online quotes and book a vetted mechanic using an online quoting engine so users know how much they should really be paying.

The survey was carried out during April-May 2015 across 182 locations in Birmingham, Manchester, London, Glasgow, Cardiff, Bristol, Leeds, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Edinburgh. Male and female mystery shoppers separately requested quotes for replacing the clutch plate, cover and concentric slave cylinder (release bearing) of a Ford Focus TDCi 2.0L 2011.

When car repairs for Bee cost more than she’s worth

Yesterday I spoke to Club member Fiona following her visit to a manufacturer approved Nissan repairer in the Midlands last week. I won’t mention their name at this stage in case they can put matters right here, but if they don’t (and I have my doubts), I will add it later.

The offending garage in question isn’t a member of our FOXY Choice network but they are signed up to the Motor Codes scheme so we have referred her to them for advice.

The car we’re discussing is an 02 reg Nissan Primera called Bee. Whilst it is undoubtedly an elderly car it has never failed an MOT and Fiona has never bought other than Nissan since passing her driving test. In short she loves and cares for this car.

FOXY’s recommended garage for members is a dealership some way across town for Fiona so we understand why she opted for a nearer but Nissan-approved independent repairer on this occasion to diagnose a mysterious light on Bee’s dashboard.

This garage identified the fault as a dodgy sensor and quoted £266 to replace and rectify the matter, all in. With the benefit of hindsight, we’d say this was on the expensive side but we weren’t involved then. The problem is that this didn’t fix the dashboard light so the work would appear to have been done to no avail.

The verdict? “We think it may be the cambelt now; this will take the bill over £1000…” their technician said. Which would have exceeded the likely value of Bee of course…

But he wasn’t at all nice about this, made Fiona feel the car was too old to be worth bothering with, nobody apologised to her and the final straw was when he suggested it’d be best to explain this to her husband – as if her ‘pretty little head’ couldn’t take all this in.

Needless to say, Fiona’s husband wasn’t overly sympathetic about this and was quick to point out that they had failed to diagnose the problem correctly so why was there a bill? An impasse was reached and even the Manager seemed unable to come up with a solution of any sort.

It’s too soon for us to know where we go from here until Motor Codes gives us their advice.

Certainly Fiona will now go to our ‘female friendly approved’ dealership and we know she’ll be looked after there. But the tricky thing is always when motorists are expected to pay these offending bills before collecting their car, even when the bill seems unreasonable. Perhaps the work wasn’t needed, or done in the first place? Our experience suggests that many garages get paid for unnecessary work in similar and often more expensive situations and then the motorist has no option but to take his or her car elsewhere to remedy the situation, paying again and unsure of how to get the initial party to cough up.

As a result of some to-ing and fro-ing here, possibly at the mention of the second car dealership involvement, we had understood that the Nissan approved repairer had dropped the bill to c£90. That sounded better than the initial £266 of course but it’s still important to remember that the garage hadn’t fixed the problem and may well have replaced a perfectly good car part unnecessarily. In fact the Service Manager said that the new parts were removed, so how can Fiona be sure that the work was ever done?

But when her husband went to collect Bee he was charged £288 so not only did they exceed the original quote by £22 but they also seem to have ignored the fact that this has achieved nothing for the customer. So was the work done or not? The second car dealership should be able to confirm this or otherwise and we’ll be looking at this invoice and breakdown of their charges later.

But the lesson is surely that they could have saved face by being upfront and honest about the problem, realistic about the value of the car they were working on and more knowledgeable overall. Aren’t they supposed to know what’s wrong with a car, not just say ‘we don’t know’ which is how they’ve left things for Fiona. We certainly thought a manufacturer approved repairer should know. But being an authorised Nissan repairer doesn’t count for a lot really when the person representing this brand is rude, patronising and uncaring.

We’re in this for the long haul of course because Fiona is a member. If we don’t get the right outcome for her in a reasonable period of time we’ll be spreading the word about this repairer within the Club. Otherwise how else can female motorists single out the best and steer clear of the rest in future. That’s what FOXY is all about.

Watch this space.

FOXY