I used to have a cool sticker on my laptop that said "99 problems and a car ain't one". Let's say I forgot about it when I decided to buy a car (well, I didn't actually). Yes, I bought a car. I bought a fucking car. And a fucking car it is. I wanted to get a car that's both useful and low on oil consumption so my choice was a Renault Megane. It was not supposed to be too old, so I set my mind on 2004 or after. (brief: LR Cars = bad; don't buy cars!)
After a couple of weeks of looking around I finally found something at a company not too far from Brussels. I went there to take a look, looked fine, sounded good. I made an advance payment of a couple of hundred euros. Came back a couple of days later to buy it. Then the guy sudden
ly started talking about how there's no warranty. Strange. What to do? I would loose the advance payment if I'd stop now. So I went ahead and did it.
By the way, no worries, I still hitched to Lithuania after that. But I also had some good trips with my car. Things broke down at random times but I found a nice garage to fix stuff.
Unfortunately, recently things broke down on a worse scale. The injection thing of the engine stopped working and somehow the entire engine (and car) is beyond repair according to my friendly vehicle repair man. Okay, I didn't need the car that badly, so I would just get rid of the remnants. I called around a bit and found out it wasn't even so easy to get rid of it. And when looking for ways to get rid of it I found out the following:
In Belgium a consumer has the legal right to minimum 1 year warranty when buying a second hand good (including cars) from a company
So now things have slightly changed. I sent the guys an email about it to state these findings. They didn't reply. I called them up today, and they're kind of dodging the issue telling me I should drop by. So next week I'll get a tow truck to tow the car there. Meanwhile, as lawyers cost an arm and a leg and Belgium does not allow "no cure no pay" cases, it'll be nice if my findings are easily found by people looking for more information about their company, to have some more leverage when discussing the settlement.
Now I happen to have quite a few domains related to second hand cars so I spent some time on making sure their name will be linked to my bad experience until they handle this in a more appropriate way. Here they are: LR Cars in Kortenberg (in Dutch).
Oh, and yes, another open door lesson learned: don't buy a car (especially not from dodgy second hand car salesmen).
