Garage’s Notice to Collect Vehicle

This Notice To Customer to Collect Vehicle: Repairs is designed to be used when any car, truck, van, minibus, caravan, campervan, trailer, motorcycle, bicycle, boat, or other type of vehicle is brought to you to carry out any work (e.g. repair, servicing, maintenance, restoration, modification, valeting), but where, after you have carried out the work, the customer fails to collect the vehicle or to give any instructions to you as to re-delivery of the vehicle to the customer. He may or may not have paid your charges for the work.

In those circumstances, even if you send any reminder(s) to your customer or you are unable to trace him, if he fails to get in touch and collect/arrange delivery of the vehicle, the law does not permit you to assume that the vehicle has been abandoned. You may not sell or otherwise dispose of it, and you have a legal duty not to deliberately or recklessly damage or destroy it.

You will not wish to be burdened with keeping the vehicle indefinitely, especially if it takes up valuable storage space. Fortunately, to enable you resolve this situation, Section 12 of the Torts (Interference with Goods Act 1977 (“TIGA”) provides a special procedure whereby you can send a notice to your customer which imposes an obligation on him to collect the vehicle. If he then fails to do so, TIGA gives you a right to sell the vehicle if you first then also send him the Notice of Proposed Sale: Vehicle Repairs etc which you can also find in this subfolder.

We strongly recommend that before you make any use of this Notice To Customer to Collect Vehicle: Repairs or the Notice of Proposed Sale Vehicle: Repairs etc, you read the Guidance Note: TIGA (Torts (Interference with Goods) Act 1977 which explains in detail what TIGA permits you to do and how to do it in relation to serving notices and subsequently selling/disposing of an uncollected vehicle or other goods.

Other template notices (which can be found here) cover other situations where a business wishes to sell/dispose of customer’s goods, namely where a business has provided (a) vehicle parking facilities; or (b) goods storage services; or (c) valuation or appraisal of goods; or (d) repair, servicing, cleaning etc of goods. Where a tenant has left any of his goods at premises after his lease/tenancy agreement has expired, and the landlord wishes to sell or dispose of those goods, see the equivalent forms of notice in our Property folder.

Optional phrases / clauses are enclosed in square brackets. These should be read carefully and selected so as to be compatible with one another. Unused options should be removed from the document.

This Notice To Customer to Collect Vehicle: Repairs is in open format. Either enter the requisite details in the highlighted fields or adjust the wording to suit your purposes.

Once you have purchased access to the appropriate document folder click on the “Download Document” link below. You will be asked what you want to do with the file. It is recommended that you save the document to a location of your choice prior to viewing.