Buying at a
dealer is notbuying from one.

It depends on who is selling it, which is exactly why we tell you first. If the vehicle is ours and you are a consumer, the legal guarantee of conformity applies; on a used vehicle it can be shortened by agreement but never below one year. If we are acting as intermediary for someone else, the guarantee runs against that person, and if they are a private individual rather than a business, the consumer guarantee does not apply at all.

Because the guarantee follows the seller, not the location. The contract of sale in an intermediary transaction is concluded between you and the person we act for, so being on professional premises, dealing with professional staff and receiving a professional-looking invoice does not by itself give you consumer protection. It is the single most misunderstood thing in the used vehicle trade and the reason the capacity is written on the invoice.

If we sold the vehicle on our own account to you as a consumer, a lack of conformity appearing within the period the law fixes is presumed to have existed at delivery, which means it is for us to prove otherwise rather than for you to prove it was already there. Tell us. If the sale was a private sale through our intermediary activity, the position is governed by the rules on hidden defects, which is a materially harder route, and you would have been told that before buying.

No. For second-hand goods the duration can be reduced by agreement, but not below one year, and nothing we write in any document reduces or excludes your statutory rights. Anyone offering a used vehicle to a consumer with a three or six month guarantee is offering something below the legal minimum, and the law rather than the paperwork decides what you actually have.

It is handed over on any second-hand sale to a private individual, because a sale concluded without it is void. That is a severe sanction by the standards of consumer law and it exists to make the mileage history behind it meaningful. Where a roadworthiness certificate is required for the sale, that comes with the vehicle too, and if a document is not ready we move the handover date rather than promise to send it on.

Yes, including when the honest answer is that we do not know. What we tell you comes from the documents we hold and what we actually know, and where there is a period we have no information about, that gets said rather than passed over. A silence where an awkward fact might sit reads as a reassurance to any buyer, which is precisely why it should not be left there.