The People's Forum: Re: Thanks for the reply...

The most important thing is to clarify what information was provided to the dealer prior to them giving you an offer (which you by all accounts accepted by signing the documents and paying the difference). If I understand correctly, the dealer had information about both the 2024 registration and the prior registration in 2019 when providing you their offer.

Generally, one expects a professional party to conduct necessary due diligence based on information provided by the counterparty. If they failed to take appropriate steps to clarify the value of the trade in car based on information you provided, I can't see that they have strong arguments to claim that the contract is invalid.

If this was me, I would send the dealer an email explaining that you believe you provided all necessary information about the trade in vehicle for them to provide an offer. If they believe they made a mistake by not taking into account informationabout the 2019 registration, that fault is upon them. You had no reason to believe that the dealer made an error, accepted the offer in good faith, making it a legally binding contract. And then simply ask them to kindly honour that contract.

By this, you signal that you understand the legal issue at hand without getting into details (which can escalate or complicate what is a rather simple question of whether the parties has entered into a binding contract). You can always get into more details or signal a willingness to negotiate later.

Previous Message

...yes there is evidence as everything was discussed on a Teams call that they recorded.

To go a little deeper into the issue they've got...when I bought the car last summer it was explained to me that it had been bought from the MOD (or from a lease company they used) and therefore there was a need to re-register it under a different registration plate. I was given all the paperwork relating to that - but it meant that the V5 document showed the date of first registration was 2019 but the date of first registration in the UK was 2024 (when the garage bought it from the MOD).

The sales guy's manager called me to explain what had happened. They are saying that because of the re-registration, when they provided the price for the part-exchange they had mistakenly looked up the book price for a 2024 car rather than a 2019 car, however, when they couldn't find the new registration plate on one of their systems, they looked up the old registration (which I had provided) and realised that they had made a mistake.
They then looked up the correct book price for a 2019 car (about 70% of the price they had given me) and THEN said that they also needed to cut that number to 60% purely because it used to be an MOD car and they are "more difficult to sell" apparently - so that took it down to around half of the part-ex price that they have provided and done the deal at.

The current situation is that I've thanked him for explaining what has happened and that I just need to take some time to process it all and think about what I want to do next as I really want the car.

There are some bits of legalese in the documents that have been digitally signed - I can post them in here if it might be useful.