► Do you, as a car trader, ever put ‘Sold as Seen’, on a retail buyer’s invoice? And do you ever claim, verbally or in writing, that you have a ‘no refunds’ policy? As I would have thought all traders and the vast majority of people who buy from them would know by now, traders simply cannot sell vehicles to retail customers on that basis. Sold as seen has no meaning in a trade to retail environment.
A trader must, by law, sell goods that are of ‘merchantable quality’ and fit for the purpose that any reasonable person might expect. What’s more, that doesn’t apply just at the point of sale; the goods must continue doing so for a reasonable period thereafter; in most cases that means up to six months!
While the six-month aspect of this is more recent, dealers ongoing responsibility has applied for ages – certainly since I first became involved with cars in the late 1970s! It’s therefore hard to believe that any trader, especially one in his mid-fifties, could possibly believe that such practices were allowed.
That, though, is precisely what a 55-year-old car dealer from Newport in South Wales tried to claim when a Peugeot 308 he sold in 2021 went wrong a few days later. According to a report in the South Wales Argus, the man in question, and the limited company he traded through, refused to take any responsibility for the fault, claiming that the car was ‘sold as seen.’ Consequently, the guy had to arrange his own repairs elsewhere, which led to further issues being uncovered. The guy then took some advice from Torfaen County Borough Trading Standards, and based on that advice, he took the dealer to County Court, and won his ca
