7:22 am, May 2, 2022
A Cazoo delivery driver crashed into a customer’s dry stone wall while delivering a Porsche.
The debacle made headlines in The Sunday Times as a reader explained how trading in their BMW X1 turned into a disaster.
The paper’s Question of Money agony aunt Jill Insley was forced to get involved after the customer faced a series of problems with their used car purchase from Cazoo.
‘On January 13 I took delivery of a Porsche Cayenne that cost £38,750,’ said the unnamed customer.
‘I had traded in a six-year-old BMW X1 in very good condition. The Porsche was described as having three minor “imperfections” and I was told that it would be fully serviced before it arrived.
‘I informed Cazoo that my driveway was narrow and asked it to note this for the driver.
‘Cazoo said that the driver would call 15 minutes before arrival and I could tell him about the driveway then.
‘The driver never called and the first I knew of his arrival was seeing him stuck against the wall of my driveway, having reversed his delivery vehicle into it.’
When the customer checked the Porsche over it had ‘lots of undocumented’ scratches.
Cazoo sent one of its team out to check the car over and agreed it wasn’t up to standard. The car had also not been serviced, as promised.
The customer agreed to swap the Cayenne for a Jaguar I-Pace, but that also had a number of imperfections when it arrived.
‘When I tried to charge up the vehicle it didn’t accept the charge, so I couldn’t even test drive it and had to return it to Cazoo for a full refund, which took about five days,’ the customer told the national newspaper.
The customer contacted Insely because they weren’t getting any response from Cazoo about settling the finance on the first car, or for the wall to be fixed.
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The Money section’s agony aunt stepped in and Cazoo’s insurers eventually paid out for the dry stone wall repair – which cost £2,800 plus VAT.
The paper’s columnist said: ‘Cazoo points out that it made sure you were not left out of pocket, and that it has sold more than 60,000 cars online in the past two years with 95 per cent of its customers rating its service as either ‘Excellent’ or ‘Great’ on Trustpilot.
‘You must be very unlucky then to get two cars in a row that had issues.
‘Cazoo has paid you £1,000 in compensation to make up for the disappointment.’
Insley added that she had ‘not received a complaint about Cazoo before’.
The story comes just a few weeks after the online car dealer was featured on BBC’s Watchdog programme over its 300-point checks.
Three customers told the programme they were not happy with the quality of the cars they bought from the online dealer.
At the time, Cazoo told Watchdog that it was ‘sorry the customers didn’t have an experience that matched their expectations’.
