Richard M

Awful aftersales with gearbox fault

Admittedly, I had a good experience when.purchasing the car, but that bit is always going to go well. We test drove a 2021 Gulia that I fell in love with, however on test driving it had a very obvious gearbox fault where it thudded aggressively when downshifting in manual mode. Aside from this, no problems at all. Obviously the sale was conditional to the fault being rectified, to which they agreed. Upon collection the fault was gone. However, a week-ish later, the fault reappeared! The dealer was an hour away and I felt like this was going to be one of those faults that would never go away and felt it was best to reject the car while we were able to exercise our short-term right to reject (which is 30 days), which is legally only allowed if there is a fault or the car is not fit for purpose. We returned the car as advised by the finance company, however Research are refusing to accept that a fault exists, or ever existed. The sales person has lied to us also by saying that he believed that it was my driving that was the problem, which I was surprised at, as he was very nice when selling us the car and we spoke about the error at length, even confirming that he experienced it on test drive. He never once intimated that he thought it was my driving. However, now it seems to be a convenient excuse. So, as it stands, they a refusing to refund us for the car. I understand that this is 'one of those things' where the fault is intermittent and it has to be present when trying to diagnose and rectify. But I'm not prepared to keep the car and go through that process for an unknown length of time, hence that I want to exercise my right to a short-term rejection. But as it stands, they want me to live with the problem. I might even be willing to buy a different car from them, but I absolutely do not want to own a car with gremlins that are potentially never ever going to get rectified. I will update this review depending on the outcome. If they do the right thing, I'll happily give them 5 stars.