Any fault must be apparent in the first 6 months of ownership; the retailer’s legal liability is for 6 years (in England). The Act does not apply to the manufacturer. After 6 years is up, they can ignore your letters etc, within 6 years, they have a legal obligation to respond to your claims (including rejecting a claim) , but that is not the same as saying everything must last 6 years. The law recognises, for instance, a cheap heavily used washing machine will not last as long as an expensive, occasionally used washing machine. If the fault becomes apparent only after 6 months, its up to you to prove it wasn’t due to wear and tear. The Act does not provide a 6 year guarantee. Extended warranties and the like provide you with additional redress, and are not instead of your statutory rights. They may, in effect, extend the period where its up to the retailer to prove it was your fault, from 6 months to say, 2 years.
Cars are not excluded, but given the abuse they take, the older the car, the harder it is for you to prove the fault wasn’t due to misuse, or that the fault wasn’t inherent at the time of manufacture (ie, was the car rusting when it left Hiroshima).
Yes it certainly works and we had a £1000 repair done free of charge out of normal warranty (4 years old) when the garage agreed the part which had failed must have been fitted wrongly during assembly at the factory.
As I understand it, for the first 6 months the onus is on the seller to show the goods were satisfactory and to show the customer was at fault if the goods failed. After that the onus is on the customer to show the goods were not suitable which we were able to do by pointing out that the whole dash needed to come out if it was our fault!
We had a claim a few years ago with a pair of leather settees. One had developed faults in the covering leading to what looked like splits appearing on one arm and a fixed cushion at 22 months old. We had a 12 month warranty period which had obviously expired but after a bit of research we found that this rule that the goods must be of serviceable quality when supplied by the seller and you have a right to a claim for up to 6 years. It became apparent that the faults were already in the leather at the manufacturing processing. We had a leather furniture specialist examine the settees and he gave us a written report which stated the faults at manufacture. It was up to us to prove that the faults in leather were not our doing through miss use, which the report confirmed.
Before we got a specialist involved the sellers were trying to wriggle out of any claim by us of the faults, actually saying we may not be using them correctly. I mean all we were doing was sitting on them, I wonder what they meant???..hmm. They agreed on a repair at first but having spoken to the specialist again he agreed that the repair would look odd, new leather against 22 month old leather, so they agreed to replace the whole settee. After a few weeks we took delivery of not one but two new leather settees. When I enquired why two replacements had arrived they said their head office department had been onto them to order the two instead of just the single one. That letter of complaint to HQ must have worked, which I wrote separately when I had received a very slow response initially from their local branch. We also got our money back for the bill for the specialist report.
