Hi this is for a friend, he bought a sierra at the time believed to be an XR4x4 it has turned out on close inspection the car is not as described and is standard, 1.8CVH I think, the car however has badges saying XR4x4 and has a button that he was told was nitrous and is in fact not connected up at the back. he would like to sue the seller of this car , it was bought privately all he has is a mobile number and they are not picking up, what is his position legally any advice appreciated thanks Dave.
Don't you just hate it when that sort of con happens. I fell for a similar one when I was younger and more naive. I'd dreamed of owning a Porsche 911 since I was a kid and although I couldn't afford a new one I finally scraped together enough to buy a second hand one. I answered a private ad in the local paper and met the seller at a pub at his suggestion. Of course it wasn't until later I realised I had no home address for him because of that.
Anyway we met up and had a few beers, all on him, before I checked the goods over. (My first mistake of course. Always check a purchase over when you are sober. Now I know why he was so generous and kept buying me rounds) The paintwork looked nice, no rust, engine sounded sweet and so cash changed hands and the deal was done. It wasn't until I was driving it home that my suspicions started to be aroused. The performance wasn't what I was expecting and it kept falling over at junctions which I initially thought was because I'd had a few too many. The suspension seemed to roll a lot in corners too. In fact the whole vehicle seemed to tilt as you turned a corner.
When I got home a mechanic friend came round to have a look. At first he pronounced it a 'minter' but after half an hour or so he started to get a worried look on his face. What first tipped him off was that there was no steering wheel - more a sort of bar thingy you held at each end. He wasn't a Porsche expert but he was sure they all ought to have a steering wheel unless it was some sort of aftermarket modification. Well I didn't know one way or the other of course never having owned one before.
I took it to a Porsche garage to have an expert check it over and I knew it was bad news from the expression on the guy's face when he finally came back to me. "I'm sorry sir" he said "but what you've actually bought is a Yamaha moped. We've checked the chassis and engine numbers and there's no doubt about it. We also counted the wheels, twice to make sure, and there's definitely two missing. It ought to have four if it was genuine."
Well did I feel a fool or what? He was right of course and why me and my mechanic friend didn't spot it ourselves I'll never know. The seller had disguised the vehicle identity by the fiendish trick of removing the Yamaha badges from the petrol tank and fitting Porsche ones in their place. The sheer animal cunning of some people eh?
I drove back to the pub at my artificially limited 30 mph top speed but the guy had gone and no one there seemed to have heard of him. I phoned the BBC Watchdog programme but there must have been a fault on the line because when I explained my dilemma there was a sort of gurgling noise at the other end and then the line went dead. I don't know what all that was about.
In the end it all worked out for the best though. I swapped the Porsche badges on the petrol tank for Ferrari ones and sold it to a local farmer at a £500 profit. Every cloud etc etc :)
The AGREEMENT was that if I won the race, you'd post under your original name confirming to the group that your car is a FAKE.
Please don't think you'll get away with this poor effort.
Everyone please note that this is TwinDTM (yes, of Manby) who managed to spin his "4x4" on the Manby bypass last week, taking out a post-box and an unfortunate Dihatsu that happened to be in the way - leaving me a clear winner.
So, my reclaimed 16 is clearly better than your fake heap of (dented) crap mr TwinDTM.
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