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Why I made this site:
Over the years I would say that I have bought (and sold) a good few cars and a handful of motorbikes, and each time that I've gone in search of a new car it's always been a case of speaking to friends and acquantainces to try and see if any of them have owned one of the types of cars I'm looking for. Or maybe do a little research in the library on vehicle recalls.
And at the end of it, taking a knowledgeable friend round to see the car, just to give it a once over and maybe spot something that I didn't see.

Granted, it's not always worked and on more than one occasion I've ended up with a large repair bill as a result of the caveat emptor (buyer beware) or a receipt that has the ominous words of "sold as seen".

On other occasions I have related my experience with a vehicle to a mate who then says with a wry smile, "Oh they all do that, didn't you know, you should have asked me I could have told you that before you bought it".

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEAM

None more so than the secondhand Mercedes which we owned and at it's 60,000 miles service we were told that the head gasket was on its way out and it would cost about 700GBp to replace (that was with a 50% courtesy payment from Mercedes because it had a full service history and they could not see why the head gasket had gone other than the vehicle must have had a hard life). After calming down and many letters and faxes to Mercedes UK refuting the 'hard life' of the vehicle and pointing out their own claim to engineering excellence (none of which received a satisfactory reply) we sold the car and bought a Honda.
It was only after a couple of months that a friend put me in touch with a Mercedes database which contained loads of data on owners gripes with Mercedes.
Lo and behold, there were hundreds of other owners with similar experiences to our own when owning a Mercedes. There was even a large number of owners who's vehicles seemed to have had head gasket failures at or around the 60,000 miles mark. I was gobsmacked, why didn't Mercedes own up and say there was a problem with the twin cam four cylinder petrol engine in the E200? More to the point, why did they actively deny that there was a problem?

So I checked out the www for any sites relating to car problems. Loads relating to specific makes and manufacturers, and even more scope if you enter the world of newsgroups and other forums. But there didn't appear to be a basic carproblem website, where a user could enter their own experience of a particular model or maybe search through the data for prospective car problems. So here it is. Obviously the more people know of it the better and more comprhensive the database will be. And hopefully, if it can bring light to the manufacturers that there may well be a basic design fault, then so be it, a job well done.
Thank you.

This Website has been produced for the benefit the car buying public and also in the vain hope that one, just one, of the car manufacturers might actually take note of the contents and realise that to err is human, but to correct that error is the magnet for future sales and to keep making the same design errors time after time, model after model is downright pathetic.