This Järvinen story stinks..
He already tried to backtrack, claiming he wasn’t blaming Kamux/the buyer of the car for anything despite the story… wow.
It’s unlikely that Kamux’s buyer would be so stupid as to remove a fuse instead of breaking it.
The entire accusation of manipulating the car’s condition is implausible.
I believe Kamux will investigate the matter.
If Järvinen is lying due to some old grudge, he will truly feel the consequences.
If the buyer has acted so incredibly solo, he will truly face severe consequences (lose his job/income).
Of course, the culprit could also be found from a less surprising direction, i.e., among competitors, which I also wouldn’t want to believe.
Fortunately, Järvinen didn’t sell his car to Kamux; that’s the silver lining! Unbelievable story…,
The car industry should definitely develop completely different rules of the game; it’s just not right that ordinary consumers bring their “hidden-defect” junk cars for trade-in, and then after the car is sold on and problems emerge, the car dealership is liable for compensation. For example, certainly more common faults are automatic transmission cars; if there’s a minor fault in that gearbox, it’s not easily noticed during a short test drive, even if one understands something about cars.
It should somehow be legally regulated that, for example, when such a “defect” appears, the car dealership would cover a certain part, and the previous owner would also have to contribute to the repair bill, and probably the new owner would also have to open their wallet a bit. In my opinion, that would be a fair game because the previous owner must have been aware of the defect in the car. More responsibility should be placed on private individuals in these matters, because they bring their broken junk cars to dealerships and just hope no one notices anything.
T: I have definitely been thoroughly screwed over in car deals with just such a “hidden-defect” automatic, but I never blamed the car dealership, but rather the previous owner-scammer who had taken it to the dealership.
This is a fundamental problem in the used goods trade when a business and consumer protection law are involved.
In principle, the price of a used item should reflect its fair value, which includes the fact that it is no longer new, not in perfect condition, and may have defects. The buyer can pay extra for it to be inspected for defects - either by commissioning a condition inspection for the car to be purchased out of their own pocket, or by buying from a dealership that performs such an inspection on every car - and naturally adds the costs to the price.
Or one can buy from a dealership that offers these additional safeguards - essentially, insurance for money in case problems are found with the car later. This might even be the mathematically smartest option because inspecting every car costs quite a bit, and it still cannot find everything, as the entire car would need to be disassembled and reassembled to check absolutely everything, which is not economically feasible.
A private seller’s responsibility in the used goods trade is practically limited to the level of “do not commit fraud”. That is, if the buyer asks about the condition of the item, it must be described truthfully. The problem then becomes proving fraud, meaning it’s very easy for the seller to shrug their shoulders and claim they didn’t know about a defect found later. And if the buyer does not inspect the item (because it costs money), then the risk of hidden defects shifts to the buyer.
Consumer protection law enables a world where the buyer does not want to pay for an inspection - either commissioned by themselves or by buying from a seller who performs these - and does not want to pay for additional safeguards / insurance against defects appearing later, but instead assumes that the item is naturally in prime condition. All of this then eats into the margins of dealerships selling used goods and raises the price of every used car sold by a dealership when these issues are resolved and repaired/compensated.
I wouldn’t necessarily mind if the provisions of consumer protection law were significantly eased regarding the used goods trade. The current situation is a bit foolish because, in practice, it’s like a lottery regarding the item’s condition - there isn’t really an economic incentive to inspect everything, and consumer protection authorities never run out of work as complaints come in on an assembly line.
When some car dealerships have no problems operating within the current rules and laws, why should the law be changed to suit the operations of a few companies?
For smaller operators, things have to work; if their reputation is ruined, they’re out of business. Salespeople at operators like Kamux don’t have this problem. The more sales, the better the commissions, meaning lying is rewarded, and costs and reputational damage don’t fall on their own shoulders. Honesty only leads to poorer earnings and, in the worst case, getting fired when no sales are made. Eventually, no honest person can be found in the company, and everyone knows it; they just exploit whatever can be exploited until the very end.
Hey, a basic inspection like that, which screens out the worst mines (issues), would only take a professional about half an hour: reading fault codes, a general look on a lift, and a test drive.
Inspection costs of hundreds of euros per car are pure fiction. Repair costs are a separate matter..
Here are Arttu’s comments on the car trade for July.
In the Finnish car market, new car registrations continued their growth, similar to June. Demand for used cars also grew by a moderate 5%, but for car dealerships, year-to-date sales figures have lagged surprisingly much behind the rest of the market, with sales shifting more strongly towards consumer-to-consumer transactions than in the previous year.
To my understanding, Hedin has type-approved RAMs in the EU. But the matter is not current, and that can be seen from this year’s registrations. Those Full-Size American pickups and Escalades and other Full-size SUV off-road vehicles are converted into light trucks in Finland, partly due to tax reasons. Again, registration statistics show that not a single American pickup or SUV off-road vehicle has been registered this year. Our thanks go to our beloved Trafi. Since the beginning of the year, Trafi has started requiring a cybersecurity certificate from US cars. (you read that right). You can guess what they think in Detroit. Another reason is Trafi’s requirement that after the light truck conversion, the car must be EU type-approved again. Finland is the only European country that requires these. But Finland doesn’t really belong to Europe.
Of course, a smarter seller prepares for these defects with a better margin, i.e., in pricing.
Newer used cars, which still have a warranty, can be sold with a smaller margin than heavily driven junk cars for which repair risks must be priced in.
The strangest thing about this is the customer’s complaint that the dealership’s buyer inspected the car thoroughly, found a defect, and priced it on the safe side, at the level of replacing the light.
The owner apparently expected the buyer, upon discovering the fault, to also debug and repair it on behalf of the owner offering the car for trade-in. Otherwise, there would be no sense in complaining that a dark light was priced at the cost of the light, not the fuse. No one can be so clueless as to take their trade-in car to be priced with a driving and inspection-unfit defect just because of a 10-cent fuse? Or is it after all? According to the story, it seems so.
Would it also be the dealership’s fault if the owner otherwise gave a worse impression of their car than reality, for example, by screwing an additional 200,000 km onto the odometer, and the dealership’s buyer had priced the car accordingly? It’s pointless to blame anyone else when he himself took a car without lights to be priced!
Is that fuse the so-called root cause/fault in this case? Often, electrical devices in cars blow fuses when they are about to completely break down (or there is some other bigger problem in the car). The fuse can be replaced and the problem is fixed, but for how long.
I understood it to mean that the owner either didn’t know the light was out when taking the car for display, or knew but didn’t know it was due to a missing fuse. If they didn’t know the light was out, then I completely understand the bewilderment after a diagnosis made elsewhere, when the cause turned out to be a missing fuse. They rarely walk out of there on their own.
Now, if Kamux were straightforward, which it is unlikely to be based on its past history, it would investigate the deals made by the buyer in question (or the seller, who also buys cars?) and analyze whether the person in question has made exceptionally cheap purchases, what faults were marked in the sales contracts at the time of purchase, and whether that person’s margin from the cars they bought and sold themselves is exceptionally good.
Nor am I holding my breath that Kamux’s internal audit (if such a thing even exists) would start investigating the matter.
I am not accusing Kamux’s corporate culture and operations of illegalities, but there seem to be immoralities. Kamux seems to be making headlines in peculiar ways unusually often now. Of course, Kamux is large, and when something steaming surfaces, digging begins, leading to various oddities being reported, whether there are grounds for them or not.
From the buyer’s perspective, it doesn’t matter why the light is dark, because the buyer sees a three-thousand-euro risk in a dark LED light of a relatively new car. If I had been pricing that car myself, I would have acted in exactly the same way.
From the buyer’s perspective, it is realistic to assume that if a fuse is missing, the circuit it protects is faulty, and if a belt is missing, the mechanism it operates is faulty. Fuses and belts don’t go missing for no reason, so the fault is not a 10-cent fuse or a ten-euro belt, but the thousands-of-euros subsystems they operate.
What’s most surprising in the car trade now in 2025 is the growth of consumer-to-consumer sales measured in units. Well, of course, Finns’ purchasing power has suffered in the 2020s due to the strong rise in prices and the decrease in real wages.
So consumers are selling and buying cheap cars under 10,000€ among themselves without any consumer protection whatsoever!!! They get good quality for cheap!
Then here on the Kamux forum, someone behind a username is complaining that they have already bought several cars from Kamux and over time, defects have appeared in all of them. For such a person, I recommend the next car purchase directly from a private individual on Tori.fi. Of course, Huutokaupat.com also has good units, where one gets to pay for the repairs oneself, and doesn’t have to argue with a nasty car dealership.
Was the fuse missing before the car was taken for a test drive? After the test drive, it was missing in any case. This is now the question on which the entire news story is based.
I myself would have told the person who came to sell the car that the light appears to be out and the fault could be expensive due to LED technology. After that, I would have asked the customer to get a diagnosis or have the light repaired, after which the deal could have continued in light of the facts.
Now, since this was not done due to a lack of situational awareness, the person who came to sell the car was left with a justified reason to suspect a rip-off on the seller’s part after the root cause was discovered. This is because the seller, during a half-hour test drive, which the car owner could not attend, had managed to detect the fault, determine the root cause, and get a repair estimate from their own company’s expert.
And even if the Kamux person was completely innocent of the missing fuse, the shadow of suspicion has once again been cast over the publicly listed company.
The same car has two different prices on the same day: the dealer’s purchase price and the retail price. The technical problems in question erode the margin between these.
As a private individual, I have successfully sold and bought several cars from other private individuals in the price range of 2 - 37 thousand. The best specimens change owners exactly this way, bypassing the dealership, in which case they can be bought approximately at the dealer’s purchase price.
You are right about this, but we don’t know the exact wording the car dealer used to express that the offer had to be lowered due to the dark light. The primary responsibility still lies with the person who removed the fuse.
If the seller removed the fuse to get the purchase price down, then the case is outrageous, but whoever claims such a thing would need evidence that stands up in court. If, on the other hand, the fuse was removed by the owner or a DIY-Pete (Puuha-Pete) who previously repaired the car, then the car dealer correctly identified the deception. Based on the story, we don’t know which is the case.
I stopped by Kamux at Ideapark in Lempäälä in passing. Inside the hall, there were junk cars worth a few thousand and imported cars worth a few tens of thousands. Those junk cars that used to be sold to small-time dealers who had cars for sale in fields along Ring Road 3 and an office in a caravan. At first glance, one would think that the fixed costs are too high for that business…
It sounds to me like Kamux is finally getting closer to the product that people want and crave. Used cars worth a few thousand, or a diesel imported from Sweden costing around 30k with good equipment.
It certainly looks nice when glass palaces fill up with such junk and car buyers who, with their butt crack showing, peek under the skirts to assess the amount of rust damage, but there’s no way to make a profitable business out of that. Staff salaries and rent for the premises must be paid. Ultimately, all that remains is damage to reputation when they fight in the consumer dispute board over the flickering fault lights.
