Introduction

This article is part of the series of Nico's Porsche Taycan Experience.

The Handover

When I received the car from the Porsche Center Basel, I was quite happy. Obviously, I mean who isn't if you get a new toy?

Driving the car home - everything went fine, until the next morning happened.

The sales person wrote me an email that they will deduct a couple of thousand CHF from the car I handed as a trade in. He did not negotiate or suggest it, but just wrote an email that basically read as follows:

"Your old car has seat damage at the back, thus we deduct a couple of thousand CHF."

So many qeustionmarks

Wait, what? This is one day after taking over the car and I was a bit in a shock. Broken seats? In my old car? I never heard or have seen that, but even if there are so many things wrong with this approach.

First of all, why not place a call and discuss the situation? Secondly if there is damage, why is it up to them to simply decide what it is worth? Thirdly, why reach out a day after and not when taking over the old car?

Images vs. images

So I asked the seller what damage he is referring to, as there was none when I used to own the car. He sent me pictures of a long broken line in the beautiful beige seats I had. What has happened there?

Having received the pictures, I went through my photo gallery and luckily I did take outside and inside pictures the day before the trade in and - there was no damage.

What happened?

So what happened? I brought the car including winter tyres (we need those in Switzerland) and 2 wheels where stored, wrapped into plastic bags on the back seats. It turned out that one of the tyres had a nail it it (unknowingly to me) and that either on loading or unloading the car, the nail must have ripped the seat.

The tyres were loaded by the local mechanic who changes the wheels twice per year and unloaded by the Porsche Center Basel.

So it is inconclusive to whoever of the two actually destroyed the seats.

Wrong approach

From my perspective, so many things went wrong at the handover. Let's assume for a moment that the seats were damaged on loading (which we don't know whether they were). Even if that was the case, I'd have expected the Porsche Center Basel to verify and reach out to me first, before deciding on their own a random number of Swiss Francs to deduct from the trade in price.

Furthermore one could argue that they should have checked the car better when receiving it (when I was there) and not come back and claim issues afterwards.

Now, it is not even clear whether it was actually the fault of the mechanic who loaded it and it could as well have been the Porsche Center itself who damaged the old car.

The resolution

After a few heated emails and heated calls the Porsche Center Basel in the end agreed on paying the agreed upon price, because it was not clear who damaged the seats. But the feeling left is like one dealed with gangsters who try to take away your money with random accusations.

Quite a rocky start, one day into - let's see how the Porsche Taycan experience continues....