What the guides are
The guides on this site answer the questions people ask when a car bought from a dealership goes wrong. They’re general information about how the consumer guarantees in Australian Consumer Law tend to work for cars. They are not legal advice, and they are not advice about your car. Outcomes depend on the facts of each matter, and none are guaranteed by anyone.
How they’re written
- Each guide answers one question and says plainly what the answer tends to depend on.
- Every claim about the law is checked against the primary sources, mainly the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s guidance on consumer guarantees and the relevant state consumer affairs bodies.
- We use hedged language on purpose. "May" and "can" are doing work in these pages, because the answer for your car may be different.
- We link to the glossary the first time an everyday term such as cooling-off period or written warranty appears, and to the primary source where one exists.
Dates and updates
Every guide shows the date it was last updated. We review guides when the law, the regulator’s guidance or common practice changes, and when a reader tells us something is out of date.
Brand pages
Each brand page covers only what that brand publishes for Australian buyers, read on the brand’s own website. The page links to those sources and shows the date we checked them. We may not have all of a brand’s information, and terms change, so every brand page says so and treats the brand’s own pages as the final word. We check the sources again before a brand page is updated.
Where a guide or a brand page names a car brand, it’s to say whose cars the page is about. brokencar isn’t affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any manufacturer, and we don’t use their logos.
Corrections
If something on this site is wrong or out of date, email help@brokencar.com.au. We’d rather fix it than defend it.