# The car finance complaint that starts with a letter you write yourself
The finance company has up to eight weeks to answer you, and there is no form. That is the first thing nobody mentions about a mis-sold car finance complaint: you don’t fill anything in. You write a letter. To the lender whose name is on the agreement — not the dealer who shook your hand — and then you wait.
You signed for the car on a PCP. A deposit, a monthly figure that felt survivable, a shiny thing on the forecourt. What you were not told, or not told plainly, was that the interest rate had a little give in it, and that the arrangement paid a bigger commission when that rate sat higher. You found out later, the way most people find out — a headline, a half-remembered advert, a colleague saying “you should look into that.” There was an optional final payment too, the balloon, sitting at the end of the agreement like a bill you’d agreed to forget. Nobody did the sums, out loud, on whether you could actually carry any of it.
So now you want to complain. And your first instinct — a sound one — is to find someone to do it for you. There are firms who will, for a slice of anything you get back. You do not need them. The complaint is free to make and free to escalate. Citizens Advice will talk it through with you for nothing. The route that matters at the end — the Financial Ombudsman Service — costs you nothing to use. Money paid to a middleman is money the process was never going to charge you.
The letter is the whole game, so it has to be dull and exact. What you bought, and when. What you were told about the interest and the commission, and what you weren’t. The final payment nobody explained. Whether anyone checked that the payments fit your income. What you want to happen — the overpaid interest returned, the agreement put right, the thing unwound. No adjectives. No fury on the page, however much you are owed it. A complaint that reads like a statement of facts is harder to bat away than one that reads like a grievance.
Then the eight weeks. This is where the process shows its real face — the holding letter, the reference number, the line about reviewing your case in light of ongoing matters. The commission question has been argued over for years, and the big industry redress scheme built on top of it has been snarled in legal proceedings, so nobody can honestly tell you when that money moves. Which is the point. The complaint you send is the part you control. The rest is other people’s timetable.
Watch what lands next, because it decides your deadline, and here the process is precise in a way that catches people out.
If a final response arrives — a proper decision letter — it should tell you that you have six months to take the complaint to the Financial Ombudsman. Those six months run from the date on that letter. Miss them, and the door ordinarily shuts. Put the date in your calendar the day it comes.
If the eight weeks simply pass and nothing that counts as a final response arrives — no decision, just silence or stalling — you can go to the Ombudsman anyway. But no six-month clock has started, because that countdown only begins when a proper final response lands. You are not racing a deadline. You are waiting on a letter that hasn’t come, free to escalate whenever you choose. It is not “six months either way.” It is one branch or the other, and knowing which one you are standing in is the difference between panic and patience.
Which is roughly where Chris comes in. Not to fight anyone — to help you produce the actual document: a clean, factual complaint letter to the lender, with the dates, the agreement details and the point of the complaint set out the way the process rewards. You answer questions about your own agreement; what our technology hands back is the completed letter, ready to send, with a plain account of what to do with the reply — including how to take it, for free, to the Financial Ombudsman if the answer doesn’t satisfy you.
You write the letter. You keep the deadline it gives you, or you note that it gave you none. That is the case, built.
If a reply lands and you’re not sure what it started, come back and we’ll read it together.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
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