Stupid question number two

[pat]

Hello again. Thought I'd carry on in the same vain as my first post by asking a stupid question.

I bought my CC from a local non-Peugeot dealer, who while their range is small (and many makes/models), advertise themselves as a 'supermarket'. I was attracted to them because they were selling my car (standard 2.0SE aluminium stylee) for £13.5k.

Now I understand their practise is to buy many of a particular make/model and get their bulk discount, to then pass on to the likes of me. The day I picked up the new car (in August 2002), there were several other unregistered silver CCs parked up waiting to go.

Without really worrying about the issue of imported cars, I was happy to buy - but I keep hearing about the resell value and other issues to do with them. Am I right in thinking this car is actually 'an import'? I have a piece of paper which appears to be the purchasing note from the supermarket place from a place in Paris - it's all in French, but I'm not sure if it's actually the place they make the CCs or a dealer there. The car was registered by the garage first (a few days before they registered it to me, which appeared to be done because I was buying it - i.e. had already put the deposit down) - I'm wondering why they did that.

In all - if this is indeed an import - what implications does this have? Isn't it essentially the exact same car, built in the exact same place as any main Pug dealership would sell? I think I've read about the warranty not lasting as long, and of course am now seeing that its resell value isn't deemed to be as high. Why on earth not?

Am I getting the wrong end of the stick here... I do love my CC and am not planning to get rid of it any time soon - just these things niggle me slightly!

[Alex LS]

In all - if this is indeed an import - what implications does this have? Isn't it essentially the exact same car, built in the exact same place as any main Pug dealership would sell? I think I've read about the warranty not lasting as long, and of course am now seeing that its resell value isn't deemed to be as high. Why on earth not?

In theory, there should be no implications. The car's built in the same place and to exactly the same spec after all.

In practice, some people just hear/see "import" and automatically think of an inferior product. That's the reason the resale value may be lower. Warranty problems are a myth (now that Pug have changed their registration procedure) as long as it's been bought from an EU dealer.

I bought mine from Virgin & it comes with a 2 year manufacturer's warranty as standard plus a 1 year extended warranty. UK-sourced cars come with a 1 year warranty plus an optional (in that you don't have to take it) 2 year dealer warranty.

In a couple of years, the price of UK-sourced cars should be much nearer that of imports in any case so the resale values should be identical.

[Mr_AWOL]

The import status will knock a fair bit off your car's value early on, but as alex says, it will become less of a difference as time goes by.

When you say about the garage registering it, do you mean that you are now second owner? Why would they do this? 'additional' owners are one thing that DOES push the value down

Having said that, as long as you are not thinking of selling in the very short term i dont see why you should have any major resale issues as long as your car is truely UK spec (i was offered a 'deal' on a 'UK spec' Xsi before i got the cc and there were quite a few differences)