|
I'm very sorry to hear of your difficult experience with the dealer. It does sound like they were, at the very least, not thorough in their inspection and preparation of the car they sold you. Whether they KNOWINGLY ignored problems or made false promises, is another matter, perhaps for the courts to decide.
I don't doubt that there will be a few letters here complaining of general shabby treatment by shady dealers, and how they're all crooks, and you should get a lawyer and go after "these bastards" .... but I don't think you've got a case.
The problems you describe are ALL common to this model of car. It's a fancy car with a lot of luxury features. They can break. All cars can break. My simple 240's can break. IF you don't want a car that's going to break, you bite the bullet and buy a brand new car with a 50-to-100K mile warranty. You got and paid for a 30-day warranty. Once it's up, it's up. That's the rules, whether it feels good or not. I'd be mad too if the car I just spent a bunch of money for broke after a short period. The mechanical items particularly could have been caught in a good mechanical inspection. Probably. Items like A/C are really tough to predict- they can be perfectly good, and leak-free one day, and dead, discharged the next. No possible way to predict. A bit of exploration of the archives here would quickly yield 100's of questions and complaints about A/C repairs in ALL old Volvos. It's a fact of life and it's part of the reason that used cars lose value. Stuff wears out, fatigues, and fails. SOmetimes it's simply a matter of getting OLD - rubber seals, hoses and such fail and leak.
You have to understand the way the law and the industry view this situation before deciding to pursue it further: You bought an EIGHT YEAR OLD car. It's well out of any factory warranty. It's beyond any EXTENDED warranty you could get from Volvo. The price for third-party warranties is quite high ($1000's)for the very good reason that you're LIKELY to use it, because something is LIKELY to fail. Those companies aren't in the business of fixing cars, they'er in the business of making money. The Volvo dealer can say "Certified Used Cars" all they want, but they're talking about cars under 5 years old, and under 70K miles. That's their idea of a used car. The Dealer's Association will concur- the NADA books only go back 7 or 8 years because beyond that, it's an "old" car and only worth wholesale prices, even if it was a $40,000 luxury car to begin with. You're taking a chance by buying it that it's going to be OK. The track record of these cars as they age is not terrible, but certainly NOT OK, and certainly NOT CHEAP to repair. Every one of the items you mention has been discussed to death here by discouraged 960 owners. I'm sorry you've had all these troubles, but you bought an old used car. Period. No one can expect a car to be a perfect machine forever, despite Volvo's reputation for longevity.
This Board, at least, can offer you some hope of finding the most economic methods of repairing what you've got. However, I don't think anything can be done about your legal situation nor can a case be made successfully that the dealer or Volvo Canada did anything wrong.
--
Rob Bareiss, New London CT ::: '86 244DL- 215K, 87 244DL- 230K, 88 744GLE- 198K, 91 244 180K
|
