Matthew L

Dream car turned into a nightmare

Where do I even start? It’s been 3 months since I purchased my 2017 Ford Focus RS from Alistair Buchan and it has quite frankly been the worst 3 months of my adult life, for the most part because of this car. It started out well, I collected the car on the 21st of March and had a relatively nice experience from start to finish, the staff were polite, and the car was clean and as pictured from the Auto Trader ad. On the way back down to the Midlands I did have to pump the tyres up but other than that the car showed no signs of any sort of issue. Once home I found that the car was throwing errors whenever it was put in reverse, turns out one of the reverse sensors had gone bad, I didn’t think much of it as I knew it was going to be a cheap fix. I honestly should have taken it back at this point because it was an omen of things to come… A few days later I go to drive the car and the tyre pressure light is on and would continue to keep coming up every few days, it turns out that 2 of the tyres have leaks from around the valves, if you’ve ever had this problem you would know that this means that the wheels need refurbishing, another cost but I decided it can wait for a few weeks and I’m glad I did. Fast forward to the 1st of April, it’s a lovely day and I decide to go for a drive, it starts out like any other drive the car is driving with no issues and I’m cruising in a 30mph zone about 6 miles from home. I start accelerating up to 60mph in 3rd gear when suddenly the car loses power and a flood of smoke is trailing the car, I manage to safely pull over and open the engine bay to find oil everywhere, the engine has blown and I’m in the middle of nowhere, after 6 hours and 3 AA van’s the car is finally recovered back to my address at 1am. The next day I do a small investigation on the car and confirm that there is at least 1 hole out the side of the engine confirming the AA’s diagnosis that the engine had blown up. I try contacting Alistair Buchan asking for some help or some money back to cover the cost of an engine and I’m told to go talk to the warranty company as they will cover up to £2000, if this was a 1L Fiesta this would be fine but here’s the kicker a 2.3L Ecoboost for the RS comes in at anywhere from £4500 for a used engine with an unknown history with no warranty to £8500 for a brand new if you can get a hold of a new one, Ford no longer make this engine. The cost alone just for the engine makes the warranty completely useless, it would probably barely cover the labour. After spending £18,000 on the car itself only 2 weeks before this you can probably imagine I don’t really have nearly 10 grand to spend on an engine, I’m going to have to use the money I had saved for a house deposit. Fast forward to now my house deposit is gone and I am finally close to getting the car back on the road no thanks to this lot, in total I have spent: • £7220 on a refurbished engine including a £1320 fee because my engine couldn’t be rebuilt • £900 on a clutch and flywheel kit because it would be silly to not do it at this point • Roughly £1000-£1500 in ancillaries, fluids, gaskets, replacement parts etc. • Roughly £600 in the tools to change an engine • £384 for a wheel refurbishment • £280.08 for 2 new rear tyres because they went bad from the car sitting on axle stands for 2 months. • £105 for the rear parking sensor and wiring loom This has been 3 months of long weekends with only my brother-in-law helping me change the engine, neither of us are mechanics. Alistair Buchan couldn’t even bother to do a follow-up to even see how the situation was going. In the end I found 4 holes in the engine, conrod #2 shattered and conrod #3 bent, I have put this down to detonation caused by poor maintenance as the spark plugs were rusted with the Ford branding on them, I don’t think they’d ever been changed despite the car having service stamps right up until I brought the car. I didn’t bother even contacting the warranty company in the end as I know from experience to even get any sort of refund from those companies the work must be done by a VAT registered garage, I could not afford that plus all the parts/engine needed to fix the problem. While I doubt, they knew the engine was failing I would have expected them to notice the leaking valves or reverse sensor issues, they clearly don’t thoroughly check their cars. The parking sensor alone would show several errors the second you put the car in reverse and considering it was facing the road, someone had clearly reversed it into the spot ready for me to take it away, I’m pretty sure they were hoping I wouldn’t notice and it would be the warranty companies problem by the time I’d driven it from Scotland to Tamworth (West Midlands). That’s the end of my review, TLDR avoid this lot at all costs, I expected some minor issues from a car with 95k miles but not a broken engine, they turned my chance to own my dream car into an utter nightmare and they should be ashamed. Should Alistair Buchan decide to have some common decency and honour I am open to compensation, I have invoices for everything.