Once you move past the bottom feeding, dubious ownership/reliability rust buckets; you find yourself dealing with car traders rather than private sellers. It’s no more comforting.
The second hand car dealing mechanisms appear to have changed dramatically over recent years, mainly driven by the way people acquire new cars.
When you see new cars advertised, they rarely show the cost of an outright purchase. Instead you can have the car for “only” £250 a month. This enticing price may hide the fact that you have to pay a substantial amount up front, are mileage limited, and will have to pay another lump after 3 years or hand it back. Most people do the latter; which means there is a constant supply of three or four year cars hitting the market.
The lease companies dispose of the cars by feeding them to auction houses, where they are then purchased by large car dealerships who carry out “our 81 point quality assurance check”, which means an apprentice with a bucket washes them and places them in a large sad car park awaiting unsuspecting punters.
The outlet has no history with the car, no interest in its quality, it just wants to shift stock before the next auction.
We visited some of these outlets. Plenty of cars on the outside, a few salesmen on the inside; mainly disinterested, other than possibly pursuing porn bots on their phones. If pressed, they would give you the keys to a car so you could inspect it. There were often obvious problems, which we reported.
“The car sounds like there is a wasp’s nest under the bonnet when you turn on the heater fan.”
“We’ll check it”, in a tone which indicated they wouldn’t and don’t interrupt my porn bot interactions again.
“The car has a very strong dog smell.”
“Yeah, the last owner had a dog.”
Smaller garages provide a more personal service, with the danger that you will acquire a sales person with the personality of a possessive puppy who will pursue you for weeks and months after you have discounted the car they were offering. The solution was to block phone numbers, direct mails to spam and, as a last resort, telling one of them to “please fuck off and never contact me again”.
The whole buy a car enterprise was time consuming and tiring, and as our frustrations grew the budget increased and we moved from acquiring a temporary addition, to a permanent replacement for our iX20, from an internal combustion car, to a hybrid, to sod it, let’s get an electric. Which we did and it’s amazing, if not the £2,500 bargain we originally planned.
Finally we had our two cars to support my radiotherapy. Then my wife decided to change her work schedule such that she could come with me for all my radiotherapy sessions; so we never needed to use two cars and the whole exercise had been an expensive and frustrating waste of time.
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