). Good to hear that i'm not alone in hating HWJ! Don't think I mentioned this, but the whole what I can only partially describe as 'buying experience' with them was shocking too, although a few of you here have found that to be OK (as you'd expect - even a bad dealer should be easy to buy from, just horrible after that). First, I went in on a Monday morning to have a look around. Turns out, this is when they have their weekly meeting. Now, there were a fair few other people floating around the showroom too, and I'd focussed in on 2 really low milage (< 2k) Z4 3.0 Coupes, so it was pretty obvious I was interested specifically in them. Now, I would have thought that any other dealer would have sent someone out to approach the numerous potential customers wandering around outside the office... Instead, every one of the staff sat in said office which had full top-to-bottom glass walls that looked out over everyone walking around the used cars, while the meeting (which, incidentally, you could hear every word of) moved on at half the pace of a snail, being led by what sounded like the most obnoxious and ill-informed 'manager' in the world ("we're not moving on the price of that car" in loud and stubborn voice, etc, etc). Anyway, after about 45mins, a salesman eventually comes over (Jeremy Somethingorother - lets say Jeremy Idiot for accuracy of personality). The usual then occurs: we sit down, I ask some questions after having done a fair amount of research about the product in places like this forum, Jeremy Idiot doesn't know any of the answers and so instead just reiterates the spec list which I already know because it's on the car and I had 45mins to contemplate it. 45mins is a long time when said list consists of 3 items. One of which is a storage pack, which of course Jeremy Idiot doesn't know exactly what that consists of. Anyway, more of the usual happens: we go about looking at my current car at the time (Mazda RX-8 PZ) and evaluating it's value before i've had a chance to drive one of Z4 Coupes on display, or even ridden in a similar car. Jeremy Idiot then asks me how much I think my car is worth, so I reply with £15-16k, because that's aroundabout a recommended (Parkers, What Car) private sale price at the time (I'm well aware that the dealer won't give a private sale price, but it's probabaly better to go with an optimistic value than £10k and then, when the dealer can get £14k for it, tell you he could only do £10k). 'Unfortunately' Jeremy Idiot comes back with a quote of £12k, about £2k below typical recommended dealer quotes at the time. I say OK, i'd still like to have a test drive of 1 of the Z4's. At this point it all falls apart. I don't, and never have had, a test drive of any car from HWJ. Now, i'm 24 (23 at the time), so I can understand anyone being skeptical of someone like me buying a prestige car, but I had my dad with me as an illustration that I wasn't just a kid looking to legally joyride cars. The contempt I was treated with was stunning. As someone running my own business, I would have thought you'd want to throw as many people as possible into your cars for test drives simply because word of mouth is pretty much the biggest and best marketting technique in the world. I realise that, given fuel, maintenance and devaluation costs, that isn't quite possible, but i'd still expect it to be much easier to get to sample a product! I would have had to have been a bit clever and cunning just to evaluate a car, let alone seriously talk about buying it. Needless to say, i'm so glad I sold my RX-8 privately (for £16k) and went elsewhere, eventually buying my Z4MC.
Since all of that, I've spoken to 2 other people who've had dealings with HWJ and they've been just as bad: 1 went in with a friend about my age and couldn't get any serious talk or a drive out of them until they mentioned they were a doctor, and another had their 3 series serviced by them and asked them to look at an oil leak at the same time. The dealership did the service and apparenly changed the oil (can't remember the cost of that, but it was massively overpriced), but chose not to fix the leak. The car went in again a week later for the oil leak, at which point the dealer charged another £450.
So there ya have it Halliwell Jones. Avoid like the plague. Not the one that just kills you, the one that takes away your limbs one by one, then you organs, and only then actually kills you.
): After the £45 key memory silliness, I decided to ring BMW to make sure they knew about my bad experience with the dealership and what they had done/said (claiming that rattles and a near-impossible to use glovebox are not warranty work, for example, is something I thought BMW might want to know about). The response went something like this: "do you want us to ring the dealership to get them to explain to you why they've done what they've done, or do you want to ring them yourselves?"... I've never known a better time to use this smilie: 