Avoiding Disaster

(buying a second hand car)

The sun’s bright and warm, the sea blue, the road winds along the cliff tops as, with the rag top down, the trusty Beetle thunders happily along as the partner of your dreams tans themselves in the seat next to you.

Sadly, the reality can be so different. Rust, white knuckle brakes, steering that's akin to guiding a cloud with a rubber band, MOT failures, lots of money and heartache, and that's if you've bought a straight one. Buy a stolen car and it'll make your eyes water.
So the wise course has to be to be very very very careful when you buy. Never ever fall in love with a car. It is a totally one sided affair that almost always ends in tears.

Never buy a car from a mobile phone, from an address into which you're not invited, or where the vendor does not appear to live (car thieves often rent or borrow houses to sell stolen cars), when they offer to bring the car to you or arrange to meet you in a service area or on the side of the road, (they don’t want you to know where they live).
Is the vehicle the genuine family hack it purports to be. Are there tapes in the glove box, old receipts and rubbish we all collect in our cars, or is it clean, one of many the dealer has as he pretends to be a private seller?

Is his name in the log book? Has he got all the MOTs? Do the identification numbers shown on the log book match those on the car? Have they been tampered with? Do they look right? Are the clean? If they are, who cleans the identification numbers! Have they been changed?
Invest in a check with one of the companies that offer this service. It will tell you if the vehicle has ever been stolen and recovered, damaged beyond economic repair and other information.
Above all, take somebody with you who knows what they are doing, and trust your senses. If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t, so don’t touch it.

Remember, the law says that you can never acquire good title to stolen goods. In English that means if you buy a stolen car, even in good faith, you will loose it and your money with it. Your insurance will not cover this situation, so unless you have bought from a bona fide dealer or one of the large auctions, that's it.

What about mechanical rolling disasters, the house of cards on square wheels?
In an ideal world, the vendor offers a genuine vehicle at a fair price and the buyer parts with the price and everybody is happy. In the world of buying and selling cars, such situations are rare.More frequently, the vehicle is described as being better than it is with the faults hidden or not declared. This goes beyond tarting it up which can be viewed as brushing your hair before an interview.
What we seek is to find the true condition of the vehicle and to buy it at a price which reflects that condition, and the only way to do that is to gain experience by getting caught out several times. Use someone else's mistakes to your advantage and take an expert with you.
What do you do if you do buy a disaster? Sadly, not an awful lot. If you have bought from a dealer, he is expected to have expert knowledge and you can try to return the car and get your money back. If he refuses, try the Trading Standards Office in the Local Authority. Get the police to look at the vehicle in the hope that it may be stolen, and they may investigate the matter for you.
If you’ve bought privately, unless you can prove criminal deception which is harder than it sounds, it is a civil matter between you and the vendor. You can try the small claims court or chase the seller through the civil law, but it can be horribly expensive and not really practical to recover small amounts, which in reality means you have nowhere to go.

So take great care, don’t fall in love, don’t ring mobiles, trust your senses, buy the right car, find that partner, the winding clifftop road in the evening sun and.... the rest I’ll leave to you.

Mike Quincey