The write-offs sold as ‘clean’ used cars

Customers overcharged thousands… as top dealers fail to reveal past crashes

MAJOR car dealers are selling second-hand cars that were repaired after being written off in accidents as having a clean history, an undercover investigation has found.

Drivers are overpaying by thousands of pounds for cars they believe were driven by careful owners and have not been in a significant crash.

The vehicles were written off by insurance companies after being so badly damaged that it was too expensive to fix them.

However, the wrecked cars are being bought at knock- down prices from salvage websites, repaired cheaply by middlemen and sold on, eventually being picked up by dealers who don’t know their history.

Although there is no evidence that the repaired cars are dangerous to drive, they should be worth far less because few people will buy a vehicle that has been in a serious shunt.

Sales staff at Britain’s largest used car dealers, Evans Halshaw, and two other big chains, Arnold Clark and Car Store, told undercover reporters from BBC1’s Rip-Off Britain programme that cars on their forecourts were not write-offs.

But the journalists had already traced the cars from salvage websites and knew they had been written off.

Dealers insist there was no deliberate attempt to fool customers, and blamed the official database, the Motor Insurance Anti-Fraud Theft Register.

Experts at AutoExpress magazine told the programme that while insurers are legally required to tell the DVLA when a car has been written off, there is no obligation to update the register, which is used by carchecking firms such as HPI to give buyers peace of mind that vehicles have not been stolen or irreparably crashed and there is no outstanding finance debt.

As a result, up to 80,000 cars a year are being written off without appearing on the register – and a large number could be repaired and sold on.

Rip-Off Britain visited the big name car dealerships in March with forensic car expert John Dabek, who examined vehicles the programme’s researchers had identified as write-offs.

He found clues to major repairs and was surprised garages did not spot them before putting the cars on sale. For example, a 2015 Ford Fiesta listed by Arnold Clark for £7,698 was said to be in really good condition with no evidence of damage. But Mr Dabek said it was worth £3,000 less because it had clearly had massive damage to the front and still had problems with some panels.

Car Store was selling a 2017 Fiesta for £11,729 on the basis it had never been in an accident when in fact it had been written off in a crash that wrecked the suspension, and Evans Halshaw was selling a Vauxhall Astra for £8,450 without any information about a serious front collision.

Mr Dabek said the firms should have spotted the accident repairs even if cars had not been registered as write-offs.

After looking at one that was supposedly pristine, he said: ‘There had been work on the Apost, which is a structural item, and it has been filled afterwards. I would expect an experienced mechanic to be able to identify that this vehicle had been subject to a major repair.’

Evans Halshaw and Car Store said they had no idea cars had been written off and blamed the data they use to check a vehicle’s background. Arnold Clark said it did all the checks it could with the information available.

÷ Rip-Off Britain is on BBC1 at 9.15am today.

‘Subject to a major repair’