Hi. I have a son (pretty clueless about cars) studying in UK and he need to move around a bit so thinking of buying a car for him before Jun-2014. I am not in UK and not sure how the car market works in UK, hence hoping someone could answer a few questions that I am having.
Our priorities will mainly be cost, reliability, ease of servicing (for example, having a large numbers of service centers dotted around the country) and last but not least, may be easy to resell the car when its not needed 3 years later. Taking those into consideration, I suppose we best stick to the best seller model like the Fiesta and Polo but we are open to suggestion
On reliability. Our first choice would be pre-registered. I understand these are seldom being advertised online and one has to frequent some of those big authorized dealers periodically to check on availability. Is that correct? And when would it be a good times to do that? Any other pointers? And I suppose these pre-registered will have the same warranty coverage from the car manufacturer except with a bit shorter warranty period? Say.....2 1/2 years instead of 3 and not merely 12 months?
Cost. It seems there are several ways of getting cars in UK and the cheapest seems to be online purchase. It seems some website will placed an order with one of the dealers somewhere else in UK and deliver the car to where you stay. Saving seems to be about £2000 to £3000 off those 2 models. So how much discount can we expect if we walked into main street dealers then? £1K? £2K?
Servicing. Suppose we get a Polo from an online merchant and it was delivered by far a away dealer somewhere else in UK, does it mean we have to bring the car back to that same far away dealer for servicing and most importantly, warranty work/claim? Or just because its a VW with warranty, any VW dealers or service centers anywhere in UK will still be happy to attend to our need and if theres warranty claim, they could also do it for free?
That all my questions for now and thanks in advance for your advise.
b.rgds
Our priorities will mainly be cost, reliability, ease of servicing (for example, having a large numbers of service centers dotted around the country) and last but not least, may be easy to resell the car when its not needed 3 years later. Taking those into consideration, I suppose we best stick to the best seller model like the Fiesta and Polo but we are open to suggestion
On reliability. Our first choice would be pre-registered. I understand these are seldom being advertised online and one has to frequent some of those big authorized dealers periodically to check on availability. Is that correct? And when would it be a good times to do that? Any other pointers? And I suppose these pre-registered will have the same warranty coverage from the car manufacturer except with a bit shorter warranty period? Say.....2 1/2 years instead of 3 and not merely 12 months?
Cost. It seems there are several ways of getting cars in UK and the cheapest seems to be online purchase. It seems some website will placed an order with one of the dealers somewhere else in UK and deliver the car to where you stay. Saving seems to be about £2000 to £3000 off those 2 models. So how much discount can we expect if we walked into main street dealers then? £1K? £2K?
Servicing. Suppose we get a Polo from an online merchant and it was delivered by far a away dealer somewhere else in UK, does it mean we have to bring the car back to that same far away dealer for servicing and most importantly, warranty work/claim? Or just because its a VW with warranty, any VW dealers or service centers anywhere in UK will still be happy to attend to our need and if theres warranty claim, they could also do it for free?
That all my questions for now and thanks in advance for your advise.
b.rgds
