leedsunited,

If you have a SOR contract, it will say something like the dealer has the authority to sell your car but it remains your property until cleared funds arrive in your account.

If you proceed to leave the car on the dealers forecourt to sell for you, unless you happen to live opposite, you will have no idea when your car sells.

In our case, the dealer part-ex'ed a Porsche against our RRS and then proceeded to call us (retorpsectively I suspect) to ask/tell us that he'd taken a more expensive Porsche in part-ex against our vehicle which meant he would have to be paying out to go through with the deal and that because he was over-stocked we wouldn't be able to have our money for a number of weeks.

Basically he had a cash flow issue.

We said this was unacceptable but, of course, the car had already been sold. Our neighbour DID happen to work right next door to the dealer in question and he confirmed the car had been driven away the day we got this phone call.

So no RRS, a Porsche in part-ex about which we knew nothing (HPi, history etc etc) and no money.

The dealer then (to ostensibly assuage our concerns) wrote out a ficticious invoice to the Porsche in my wife's name suggesting legal title was now hers until he was able to pay her the money agreed for the RRS. We had no idea if he was in a position to do this as we had no idea if he was the legal owner of the Porsche.

He then sold the Porsche anyway.

You will find even though your property is no longer in your posession, in this instance the Police are not interested (we paid them a visit) because it is a civil matter.

We retained a set of keys to the vehicle but were advised not to attempt to re-possess it ourselves - although we had no idea where it was.

At this point Trading Standards got involved.

Cut a long story short it was only until they personally paid him a visit that we got closure on the matter and funds were forthcoming.

I realised in retrospect that one has no idea how many vehicles in a showroom might be on a SOR contract which means that every sale nets the dealer only a few quid so recouping your £30K for a RRS might take forever.

This dealer in question had Bentleys, Ferraris, Porsches in his showroom but I suspect most of them were on SOR.

The dealer had also been given a "green light" to me by a friend.

I had also had a fantastically easy experience selling my RS4 through Audi on a SOR basis which gave me confidence I knew how the process worked and what to expect.

Like I said, be careful. 00 Audi B5 S4 MRC550'ed
08 RRS TDV6 HSE
03 Kawasaki ZX12R 1287cc
04 Audi 8P A3 2.0 TDi S-line

SR71, Many thanks for the explanation and i am pleased you got it sorted, i was unaware of this type of transaction and it must have been a very stressful time.