Lucy Bonham Carter writes:

"I think if a clutch failed on an new car the manufacturer would be inclined to fix it not under warranty but on a goodwill basis (with no admission of liability). If the clutch then failed again before its "time" they would be likely to put it down to driver fault and the court would be likely to support them.

On any vehicle within manufacturer warranty then provided the mileage is not very high I would also expect the manufacturer would probably fix on a goodwill basis.

For second hand cars out of manufacturer warranty it is possible to make a case that the fault was pre-existing and that the repair should be undertaken under the Sale of Goods Act. Much will depend on how soon the failure happens after the sale. I don't think the normal six month "presumption" would be certain to apply and faced with a resilient defendant, commoditised services such as Mr Clutch might prove both a cheaper and quicker option than seeking a repair from the dealer. The cost of the engineer's report alone could exceed the replacement costs.

In a reader specific case over failure on a pre-registered car (re Vauxhall and Network Q) I would probably argue that the various consumer protection stacks up like bricks. The bedrock is the Sale of Goods Act and the CPRs. On top of that sitting side-by-side the manufacturer warranty and that offered by Network Q. Both of these are effectively contracts and the terms of one are unlikely to supercede Mr Carlisle's agreement with the other. If the reader's contract with Network Q suggests that it covers clutch repairs then that is the one the reader claims against.

The issue of Dual Mass Flywheel failure is slightly different. We have successfully argued that DMF failure (particularly in newer cars) is almost always the result of a fault in the design or the DMF rather than driver error. Manufacturers (and dealers) have in the past used "clutch misuse" as an excuse to avoid finding a repair that was actually caused by a failure of the Dual Mass Flywheel.

This seems to be increasingly rare and in the event of a DMF-related failure within the normal warranty period of three years the manufacturer will normally meet 100% of the costs as a warranty claim.

However if the car is more than three years old and more than six months from purchase I would expect the buyer would have to pay for any failure in the Dual Mass Flywheel."