mazda pinetown gave us a used car when we paid for a brand new car

my partner had a terrible service with Mazda pinetown

This is a mail we sent to Mazda and we are currently sharing with everyone who can make other people aware of this terrible practice especially women going to buy cars for the first time alone :

I recently purchased my first car from Fury Mazda in Pinetown, Durban and I had a very unpleasant deal. I bought a Mazda cx3 active automatic being assisted by a salesman . On the 12th of September 2018, we were communicating via WhatsApp when he sent me pictures of the car that I was to buy and he assured me it was a new car and even requested that I pay a R20 000 deposit. I did so and the next morning (13th September 2018) he informed me that finance had approved and congratulated me.

I only made the deposit payment on Monday the 17th of September 2018 and then went to collect my car. When I was collecting my car,it was placed on the preowned section and when I asked why it wasn’t on the new section like every other new car that is collected by a customer, he said that section was too full and they couldn’t make space for me. He also made an excuse about the gift that I was meant to get saying they are out of stock. He also couldn’t give me my spare key and the service& manual book saying it was locked away somewhere somehow.

The car had 161 kilometers on the odometer and he said that’s because they(salesman) have to test drive the cars before they sell them to make sure they are good enough.

After about 2 weeks from when I picked up my car he finally met with me and gave me my spare key and an umbrella as my gift. There I asked him why he didn’t tell that the car was branded before because I had noticed branding marks along with some scratches when I washed my car for the first time. He told me that Mazda does put branding on new cars also and not only on demo cars. He further went on to say that the scratches were my fault and that Mazda had nothing to do with them.

On the 25th of October 2018 I received a copy of the log book which I had to ask for and it showed the status of the vehicle as USED. So this confused me because I paid for a brand new car so that should be reflecting on the log book that I am the only owner of this car.

I asked salesmen about this and he claimed to not know anything so I left work immediately and went to Fury Mazda where I spoke to his manager who passed me on to the branch manager. The manager told me that the status of the vehicle on the log book is not so important as long as the car itself is new. I was unhappy about this and he then said he can change the vehicle status as long as I write an affidavit affirming that the car was new when I collected it. I wrote the affidavit basically saying that when I was buying the car I was told it’s new and so I expect to be the first owner of the car. He also said they will polish the car to remove the branding marks and they went on and did a terrible job at it because it came back worse. Now im paying for car finance for a new car when infact my car is not brand new.