Toymods Car Club Inc: General Car Talk => do u allow test drive?

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Rainey
Regular

Location:
Hobart, Tasmania
Registered:
January 2005

Re: do u allow test drive?	Mon, 18 July 2005 07:07

On the subject of deposits, I had a situation again with another ST184 that I was looking at: I went to the owners place to look at the car, I was kinda partial to it thinking "this is probably the best I'll find in Tassie". So I went for a drive with the owner, at first he drove, this should have been a clear indication to the condition of the car but at the bottom of his street he tried to do a FWD burnout onto the main road (the car was so run down it hardly made a squeak), I thought "not cool". Anyway he pulled over and said I could drive it but on the condition that I break it, I bought it. I drove it sensibly of course and by it being the first ST184 I'd driven I couldn't compare it to anything, however it still felt like a dog to drive (second gear syncro was shot to bits), bad interior, aftermarket falling-to-bits steering wheel and shoddy polish job down to the bare metal in places. Being young, naive and frustrated in my search for the right 5th Gen Celica I was still interested because he'd fed me stories such as "oh they're all like that, thats common with these cars" I belived him. So what I did is I went home and wrote out a contract that I would give him a $400 deposit to get the car inspected, ensure he would not sell it to someone else in the meantime and under the condition that the estimated need-to-fix list did not exceed $2400 I would purchase his car. I did this because he said he had a few people interested and I didn't want to pay for the inspection to be done and still have the car taken from under my nose (makes sense right?). Anyway I got it done at a respectable workshop whom I have dealings with through work and the owner is like "cool I know the owner there too". My specific instructions to the workshop was that I am paying for the inspection so I am the sole recipient of the report. Of course they said this is standard practise and obliged diligently... Needless to say this guy harassed the workshop throughout the inspection for some updates and they continually refused. The inspection showed that the car was virtually impossible to determine any sort of compression or power it was so shagged so I explained this to the owner and said that I wanted my deposit back, he returned it because he knew I had the signed contract but he was pretty pissed off. He didn't even collect the car for the next 3 days from the workshop and they called me to ask if I knew anything about it... In the end they had to drive it over the road to a public carpark and leave it there for him to collect so they could make room in their garage! He was a knob and I don't regret doing what I did at all! Saved my own backside from a shoddy lemon and a dodgy dealer. [Updated on: Mon, 18 July 2005 07:09] [Report message to a moderator]

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