The Great Trade Centre www.carsupermarket.org.uk

We have now bought two cars from Car Giant, and would recommend them.

The cars are often high mileage ex-company cars. We see this as a plus, because company cars are usually well serviced; and the high miles are mostly done on motorways - so there's less strain on the car compared to stop-start traffic.

You can sit in and look into as many cars as you like, but can only test drive two per day (not sure how they check on this?). The test drive is nothing more than a trip around the industrial estate.

Despite this, they will fix any problems you may encounter after you get the car home. They have a schedule based on value/mileage. The minimum period you have to take it back is 30 days. The maximum (from memory) was 90 days. We think this is long enough to find any faults.

How do we know about this? Because our car was faulty! We took it back, it spend a week being repaired (and they gave us a car to use whilst it was being repaired), and then all was fine.

The Great Trade Centre is a huge yard with well over 1000 cars of all makes and models. They are nearly all ex-fleet, althugh there are a few older part-ex examples. Cars are competitively priced and the ability to view and sit in such a range of cars can be a very useful component of deciding which model to buy, even if not from the Great Trade Centre.

Due to insurance reasons (no trade plates available) test drives are limited to driving up a side road and back, so I would heartily recommend an AA or RAC check before you buy. There is no waranty, they will only guarantee that the car is roadworthy when it leaves them (even if it is only firing on 1 cyclinder with all the valves burned out an no big ends). So check carefully. Don't buy their finance or alarm fitting services. Stick to cars only!

I bought an Audi A4 from them 6 years ago and have been very happy with it. It had done 118,000 miles when I bought it and has now done 156,000 m. I have had no problems with the car as the majority of the mileage was motorway mileage and the car had been regularly serviced.

The salesman did try to sell me an alarm for £200 or so, saying he didn't think the car had one, all Audis are factory fitted with alarms and immobilisers.

It may be worth taking the registation number of any car you are interested in as most main dealers hold a database of their cars and can tell you the service history and what has been done to the car in the past.

Recommended, but do your research thourghly and be careful.