Motorists who saw the initiative as a handy way to own your own car, are left with hefty monthly installments after a business agreement between the companies responsible for the initiative went sour.<\/p>\n
Many people saw the “Drive a new Car” initiative as a way to afford a car you would not otherwise be able to.<\/p>\n
The business plan was simple: You could choose to either ‘Earn while you Drive’ where you get paid per kilometre that you drive or ‘Earn while you Own’ where you received a fixed amount per month.<\/p>\n
All you had to do in return was have a sticker on your back window with a unique code and contact details to lure in more clients.<\/p>\n
The initiative was cooked up by a company called Satinsky Group from Pretoria together with Hong Kong based Blue Lakes Trading and Promotions.<\/p>\n
Miemie Smit, who owned a car on the Earn while you Own module, said that she received an amount of R570 per month.<\/p>\n
“For us it was a bonus. You had to pay the car installment yourself anyway. We never depended on the money we got to pay the car.”<\/p>\n
She says that the only thing that has changed is that she got to pull of the sticker.<\/p>\n
“Looking in your rear-view mirror looks completely different all of a sudden.”<\/p>\n
Ria Dreyer, owned a car on the Earn as you Drive module.<\/p>\n
She says that, lucky for her, she only has a couple of months left before her car is completely paid off.<\/p>\n
She earned anything between R950 to R1 000 per month depending on the kilometres she travelled.<\/p>\n
“They told us that there is nothing we can do legally, because we have a contract with the bank for the car, not with any of the other companies.”<\/p>\n
Others weren’t so fortunate. Horror stories of people who bought a car on this principle just months ago were told. They are now responsible for the whole installment without any reimbursement.<\/p>\n
The black and white of it is: if there was no promise of getting an amount of money back, which you could use to pay off your fixed monthly installment, many people would not have bought these cars.<\/p>\n
Satinsky got to sell a lot of cars, there is rumored to be as much as 17 000 of them on the road, and now does not have any contractual responsibility towards its clients.<\/p>\n
Leaving them to face a hefty installment in a time when a threatening recession is looming on the horizon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Drive a car for as low as R699 per month? Not anymore. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1848,"featured_media":13997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"hasGravity":false,"cxt_article_byline":"Jana Boshoff","cxt_disable_google_ads":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,2],"tags":[1049,1858,1860,1857,1856,1859,1088],"class_list":["post-13996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","category-news-headlines","tag-danger","tag-drive-a-new-car","tag-hong-kong-based-blue-lakes-trading-and-promotions","tag-r599-new-car","tag-r699-new-car","tag-satinsky-group","tag-warning"],"category_labels":{"Category":"News","SubCategory":"Local news"},"tag_labels":["danger","Drive a new car","Hong Kong based Blue Lakes Trading and Promotions","R599 New car","R699 New car","Satinsky Group","warning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1848"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/develop.citizen.co.za\/middelburg-observer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}