OK, that is an interesting suggestion, is there a guide to my rights in this respect, and to the best way to follow that process.

I mean I have owned it for 17 months so will it not be very difficult to prove grounds to reject it, Obviously all the breakdowns are documented by local Peugeot main dealer in Hatfield, but I have never spoken to the dealer I bought the car from since he is not local.

I once before took a car reseller to small claims and it was a very painful experience which I would not want to repeat. this Pug is the most unreliable car I have EVER owned, only my "on its last legs" Galaxy broke down so often and it was 7 years old and had lived a hard hard life having first given years of reliable motoring.

Edited by guygamps on 18/07/2012 at 20:40

Sorry - this link doesn't work. Could you try putting it up again?

Although the above links is dead I did find this:

www.honestjohn.co.uk/faq/consumer-rights

Questions, the information page tells me " Appeal Court Case law has held that the supplier must be given three chances to rectify the fault for which the goods are rejected"

I bought the car from Peugeot Dealer "A" , but the four repair efforts have been by Peugeot Dealer "B". As far as I a concerned, a trained Peugeot tech is a trainined Peugeot tech, but given the circumstance do I now need to wait for three more breakdowns and have Dealer "B" see the car, or have I met the required condition (allow for 3 attempts to repair).

In each case the car has appeared to be repaired intially, only to break down again. 4 breakdowns in 8 months, but the first breakdown was more than 6 months after I bought it, and the ruling seems to be that I have to prove the car was faulty at time of purchase. How long after a breakdown is it considered reasonable to conclude the car is repaired properly and if the first breakdown is more than 6 months after delivery does that weaken my case?

Anti pollution? Would that be a DPF issue? Is that a sign your doing too many short stop start journeys? I'm interested to know exaclty what that message meant.

Right now, with the prohibitive cost of motoring, increasing degradation UK driving surfaces and dealer/garages looking to extract every penny where they can, there's only three rules to buying any car of any size or type.

1) Proven reliability

2) Ride comfort

3) Reputable after-sales dealer nearby

Everything else is personal preference. If your chosen vehicle scores positive for those three, your at least half-way to tangible customer satsifaction, unless your unlucky of course.

Peugeot currently have a poor reputation for 1), used to be great at 2) (not now), and 3) is the luck of the draw.

As the original poster, I was interested today to spot some posts on this thread long time after I stopped posting.

To recap, our errant Pug 3008 was replaced thanks to a very fair offer (close to the retail value not trade in value) providing we stayed within the PSA group, since Mrs G and I had good experience of Mitsubishi previously we got a C Crosser, since it is shares large amounts of Mitsubishi DNA!

the C Crosser is excellent, drvies and handles sublimely for a car its size and wieght, we both like manual cars that "engage" you, and the C Crosser does just that, the gear change is lovely and precise, so is the steering, there is non of the vagueness of our Mitsubishi Grandis (which we had before the Pug 3008), and all the driving experience is very very good, the practicality and build quality are good too, easier to get the main passenger seats folded away than on the Grandis. 6/7 seats are an afterthought, but we don't really need them... mind you they have prooved useful twice already on journeys that otherwise would have needed 2 cars

The negatives.

Boy is it noisy, not just diesel engine noise, but road noise, tyre noise, a simple SPL meter app on my phone at motorway speed shows about 85dB noise level. I had a car audio insttaller look at it (thinking of upgrading the speakers) and he said there is absolutley NO sound deadening materials in the car, the carpet is straight on to the metal. I am thinking of getting a Noise Killer kit fitted,

The SATNAV head unit looks the business but is terrible, you can't enter postcodes and at least 50% of the addreess you try to enter it won't find first time, e.g. Garston Drive, does not come up under town = Garston, you have to start with town = Watford to find it, even though Garston is in the satnav, and even though Garston Drive is for sure in Garston.

The built in music server is useless, you rip CDs in to it, you cannot load MP3s etc from a USB stick, and when you rip CDs, at least 70% of them don't show CD title and track names despite the built in Gracenote database. I upgraded the map and the Gracenote CD Database, and didn't see any improvement, the whole head unit is crying out for a firmware update or heading for the trash!

The FM radio is the worse I have ever known, it takes ages and ages to tune in to a preset station, and has the worst reception of any car I have ever driven.

I want to upgrade the head unit to a Pioneer or Kenwood, but have been told that it cant be done because all the car set up menus are through the head unit, Looks like I am stuck with that then :-(

the noise (which can probably be sorted) and the naff head unit (which apparently can't) spoil what is otherwise a really really really good car