Playbook, car dealership
Four ways to sell a car, four different warranties behind it
The fact that settles this question is one the customer almost never states and often does not know: which category their car was sold under. A dealership site that answers warranty questions with a single paragraph is giving one answer to four different situations, and the one it will be wrong about most damagingly is the trade sale, which is the one deliberately sold on different terms.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for warranty and repairs holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- One unstated fact decides everything, so the correct first move is to establish the category rather than to answer, which is unusual for a question this common.
- A trade sale is the sharp end of it, because it is sold on terms that are deliberately different, and a buyer who has not registered that will assume the cover they saw advertised on the forecourt.
- Cover is conditional on the car being serviced at the intervals in the book and the work being recorded, so the warranty conversation and the servicing conversation turn out to be the same conversation.
- Statutory rights when buying from a trader sit alongside a warranty and are not replaced by it, which is worth saying unprompted rather than letting the warranty look like the whole of the buyer's position.
How it arrives
- does it come with a warranty
- how long is the warranty on an approved used car
- is the clutch covered
- do i have to service it with you to keep the warranty
- what does the warranty not cover
- i bought it as a trade sale, what am i entitled to
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Cover set out per category of sale | New, approved used, standard used, trade sale. Four blocks rather than one paragraph, because the differences between them are the entire content of the answer. |
|---|---|
| The servicing conditions attached to each | Intervals, where the work may be done, and what has to be recorded. This is the condition that quietly voids cover, so it belongs next to the length rather than in a schedule. |
| The exclusions, and what voids cover outright | Wear items, modifications, missed servicing, use the terms exclude. Written plainly, because a buyer discovering an exclusion at the point of a failure is a complaint rather than a query. |
| How a claim is made and where the car has to go | Who authorises the work, whether it has to come back to you, and what happens if the car is a long way away. The last of those is asked constantly and answered nowhere. |
The reply
It depends which way the car was sold. New, approved used, standard used and trade sale carry different cover, and our warranty page sets out each with its length and its exclusions. All of them are conditional on the car being serviced at the intervals in the service book with the work recorded. Whatever the warranty covers, your statutory rights as a buyer from a dealer sit alongside it rather than being replaced by it. I cannot see which category a particular car was sold under, so aftersales can check that against the paperwork.
It refuses to answer until the category is settled, which is the only honest way to handle a question with four correct answers. Naming statutory rights without being asked is what stops the reply reading as a narrowing of what the buyer is owed, which is how most warranty answers read.
Where it stops
The trigger. Whether a specific fault on a specific car is covered, and anything about a claim that has already been made.
Whether a particular fault is covered needs the paperwork for that car in front of somebody. Leave your name, a number and the registration and aftersales will check it and call you.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- That a specific fault is covered, or is not.
- That a warranty replaces or limits a buyer's statutory rights.
- Cover for a car whose sale category has not been established.
- That servicing elsewhere will or will not affect cover, since that is in the terms rather than decided here.
Questions
- Is it risky to mention statutory rights ourselves?
- The risk runs the other way. Buyers already half know they have them, and a warranty answer that does not acknowledge them reads as an attempt to substitute one for the other. Saying it plainly costs nothing and it is the sentence that keeps a query from becoming a dispute.
- How does it establish the sale category?
- By asking, once, and then handing over. It is one question rather than a diagnostic sequence, and if the buyer does not know, that is precisely the point at which aftersales with the paperwork is the right destination.
- Should trade sale terms be on the public site?
- Yes, and separately. Burying them makes a difficult conversation worse at the moment it happens. A buyer who read the trade sale block before purchase has a different set of expectations from one who first meets it after a gearbox goes.
Keep reading
- Everything for a car dealershipStock moves daily and finance adverts are regulated, so this is mostly about what a dealership assistant must never claim to know.
- Handling warranty and repairs in generalCustomers conflate a manufacturer warranty, an extended plan and their legal rights. Keep the three apart and never close the third.
- The documents that decide whether the drive happensA licence, a minimum held period and an insurance arrangement decide whether a test drive happens at all. Say all three beforehand.
- The buyer who has chosen one, handed over before somebody else doesA reservation holds a vehicle and usually takes a payment. That belongs to a person, and the assistant's only job is speed.
- The number in the windscreen is not the number on the invoiceThe screen price, the admin fee, the first registration cost and the road tax are four separate numbers, and only one of them is on the advert.
Try it on your own material
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