facture dispute avec garagiste
I reached an English-speaking sales agent, who listened compassionately to my case and assured me that it was utterly illegal for my garagist to give me a big facture on a small devis, with never any notification or option to consent to an increase in price. I've verified this information with additional research. What was not true is that the next step is paying litige.fr to get a letter from the huissier de justice (€200) and when there's no response then to pay litige.fr (€150) to send the dossier to the tribunal (actually the public volunteer conciliator and then the tribunal). Note that at no point did litige.fr advise me that this process will likely take 6-9 months! And this process is a later recourse. The next step is defined on the page "Médiation des litiges de la consommation" of the French government service public (sorry that trustpilot doens't allow me to paste the link), which explains that
commercial vendors (including garagistes) are required to offer customers recourse to mediation in case of dispute. The mediator contact must be on their website, and this service is paid by the vendor, not the customer.
