[ceczar]

the bmw guy doesn't expect you to pay but from his perspective he might as well ask just in case you feel guilty enough to give him free money.

i work in finance, and every time there's a screwup that costs us money, we'll usually call the other involved firm (usually multiple people contributed in some way to the screwup) and ask them to chip in to make up the difference. usually these are situations in which they have no legal responsibility, but every once in a while they'll pay, so we ask.

also, even if you did feel guilty enough to ship him some money, he clearly just made up the $10k number. it's highly suspect that a car would depreciate by 30% in 6 months. a more reasonable estimate of how much it cost them is the change in the blue-book value over the 6 months.