Driving Change – Update/At Last

At the start of November, I had to buy a new car, and used Cazoo to do so.  Today, I finally received one.  It has been a long process!

The first one I bought (a Kia Optima) was due to be delivered on November 6th.  That day, after the delivery slot had closed, they called and said “While we were checking it, we found a problem with the rear bumper, so we need to respray it.  No, I don’t know how long it’ll take, I’ll call you back“.  (Spoiler : They didn’t call back)  Not a great start to things, but… OK, I guess that at least they’d checked it.

Time went on. They came back a few days later, still saying “There’s a problem, we don’t quite know how long it’ll take“. I kept getting “we’ll let you know [in a couple of days time] when we know more” (which they never did, I had to call each time)  We got to two weeks late, in which time “a problem with the bumper” had turned into “a problem with the gearbox” (on an auto box with less than 30,000 miles on it?!?) had turned into “we need to replace the gearbox, and don’t know how long that’ll take“.

At that point, they decided to take the Kia off-sale, and refunded my money.  Which was deeply annoying. Understandable in the circumstances, but annoying all the same.

However, they offered a discount on another purchase with them (and had already offered a day-rate for inconvenience and travel costs) so I stuck with it, and ordered another car – this time a Vauxhall Insignia of similar age, and similar low mileage. (Under 20,000 miles for a seven-year-old car)

Thankfully, that one arrived today – and all seems to be OK so far. It’s had a small (in my terms) test-run to  make sure it’s not totally rotten, and it’s going to get some testing over the next couple of weeks. (In that we’ll be covering a mileage in two weeks that is on a par with what it’s been doing annually so far!)  As with the Kia, I’m as protected as possible – if it’s shit this week, it can go back with no penalty. From there it’s got a year’s warranty including Roadside Assistance, and it’s been paid with a credit card for that Section 75 protection.

Mind you, at the moment I wouldn’t recommend Cazoo to anyone.  I’m hoping that this second purchase might ease my dislike of them – but the entire experience has been an utter, utter shambles. I suspect that they’re OK so long as everything runs smoothly and to the script, but as soon as things go awry they’re all at sea and nothing short of fucking useless.

• To date, there’s been absolutely no apology from them for pissing me about.
• They assigned someone as a “case manager”, but it took a week to even discover that. Additionally, there’ve never been any direct contact details – everything goes through their generic customer-service email account.
• That “case manager” couldn’t manage their way out of a paper bag.  They had absolutely no understanding of things, and were strictly stuck to their script with zero flexibility.
• That “case manager” has also completely failed to escalate things as they got worse – or at least, if they have escalated, that’s never been made clear to me.
• The daily rate for “travel costs and inconvenience” was fairly pathetic at the beginning, and Cazoo then tried to reduce it during this whole process. (Sadly – for them – they’d named the rate in their early emails, so they were knackered on trying to reduce it)
• However, for some reason they’ve wanted receipts to prove I’ve had travel costs – God knows why, just paper-pushing bean-counters – and that caused real confusion with the case manager.  No matter how many times I explained that I wouldn’t get a receipt until I’d paid for the extended car hire (and that wouldn’t happen until I’d taken delivery of a new car) we were stuck on the “But we need a receipt” loop.
  I ended up going to the hire company and closed off one hire (and then started a new one) in order to get that receipt.  Utterly farcical.

There’s still going to be some stuff ongoing in this – yes, they’re paying the daily travel costs rate, but that’s less than half the cost of the car hire I’ve had to have while they’ve been pissing about. I’ve been reasonable, in that I originally had a week’s rental to cover over the first delivery date and I won’t include that initial period in what they need to repay.  But the subsequent three weeks hire have been entirely down to Cazoo messing things about, so I feel it’s only fair for them to pay for that.

So once I’ve paid for the final week (this Friday, assuming that the Vectra stays being decent) then I’ll send the receipts and an invoice (less what they’ve already paid) to them. From there it’ll be interesting to see what happens – I know what my expectations on it are, but we’ll see.

Right now, I’m just hoping that everything is now as done as possible. This month has been a ton of unnecessary hassle, and it’d be good to end the year with no further fuckery.