Martin F

Very poor

My experience with Seawards Portsmouth was very poor. I personally would not recommend this company. From Seawards I purchased a Dacia Logan. To be fair, the initial purchase of the car was a positive experience. It was after this point that everything went downhill. I had an old Scenic which Seawards offered a low but expected part exchange figure. I decided to sell privately for more return and Seawards promised to let me know my collection date at least with two weeks notice. They also promised fortnightly updates as it was a factory order and expected to take a couple of months. I was never given any updates at all. In fact I went back to the dealers in person to get an update and was told a date it was arriving in the UK but it will take weeks to make it to Seawards and they would let me know. Again, I never received any updates I was contacted and told my car was ready and I need to collect it. I had to sell my Scenic for a very keen price as I did not have the promised time to sort this out. In Seawards contract of sale, you are given two weeks after the delivery date to collect or they keep the car and your deposit. I was also told I could not collect the car at the weekend as they are busy with other customers. When I collected the car all the dirt form when it has been at sea and stored at the docks had not been cleaned off. There was a big black mark on the bumper which looked like damage but it was more dirt which they scraped off with their nail! The car was supposed to come with floor mats and a full tank of petrol. The floor mats were missing and it had ¾ tank of fuel. I was told that the parts department was closed and £40 of fuel is what they consider a full tank. I would have to come back another day to collect the mats, but in the end they found a set. The next day I noticed a dent in the wheel arch which was slight and was missed due to the dirt hiding it. In the boot of the car the Dacia handover checklist which had not been completed. Seawards told me they use their own checklist and they are happy to send it over. An attempt of falsifying a document as the car had clearly not been prepared due to the dirt, paperwork left in the boot and missing parts from the order. They also were not prepared to fix the dent as I had driven the car away. I then made a complaint to Dacia UK who pressed on Seawards to fix the dent. However, before this date the care developed faults. The speedo was not working properly and the car was loosing power intermittently. When I returned the car back for repair I was given a Clio courtesy car. The pushchair would not fit in the boot so I was told to put the seats down, leaving nowhere for my children. The repair had to rearranged but I was promised a Scenic. On the next repair date the Scenic had been given to another customer and I was told that they do not promise a certain car, when they did! Eventually they arranged a Scenic courtesy car. When I was contacted to say repair was complete I was told that they could not see any errors in the computer and so they had no reported fault. I then insisted they find the fault and repair it. The response was that if they cannot see the fault then they will do nothing about it. I had to point out consumer law that they legal responsibility is with them to prove not fault exists. A manager became involved and test drove the car and noticed the fault and decided he would write a report explaining the cars engine was not powerful enough to run the air conditioning so it was not a fault. Between the lines this report basically states this car was poorly designed. All Seawards would offer was 50% of the first service as an apology as to offer more would be unfair to its platinum club members. Not sure how this logic works, they can treat you as badly as they like but apologies are limited to a gesture of goodwill no greater than what they provide for people paying for a service. Under this false logic if you are a platinum club member and receive really poor service you will just have to lump it without an apology.