My dream car gave me a headache from day one

I BOUGHT a 2010 Smart Fortwo in November 2017, paying cash for it.

The seller swore that the vehicle had been serviced at Mercedes-Benz and that there was an electronic service record.

He also gave us an invoice from a wheel alignment place that he claimed was for a service.

All that it said was that “work was carried out as requested”. When pressed, he admitted that the vehicle had incurred a “small bump” on the front righthand side. This was a masterpiece of misinformation as we later discovered.

The vehicle was due to go through roadworthy testing and he pushed that the registration be done prior to this.

Once the stars were out of my eyes, I could see that it would never have been declared roadworthy.

Currently my beloved car is sitting at Smart Services Midrand and it is going to cost at least R22 000 to fix the errors.

I have loved the brand since 2000 when I saw two of them sharing a parking space in Germany.

I owned the numeric blue Smart Car Passion and it broke my heart when an oil ring blew and the Mercedes-Benz agents couldn’t fix it.

I spent the next five years driving a Chevrolet Spark. Finally, I was able to get rid of it and I was adamant that I wanted another opportunity to live the dream. I was so keen in fact that I threw common sense out of the window and bought a car off Gumtree: a 2010 Smart with only 37 000km on the clock.

On the second day I had it, the bonnet fell off. On investigation we discovered that the “slight bump” had realigned the fender and the bonnet no longer sat flush, hence the reason for the bonnet lying on the side of the road.

This problem seems to be located at the site of the “bump” as bodywork clips and panel clips are broken or missing.

Then the radiator started to leak. We traced the source and fixed it. Then we developed another leak and again had to track, trace and fix.

We discovered that the cooling bay components are held together with a mixture of polystyrene and cable ties.

Then the radiator worked loose and was in the process of falling on to the road. Again, if the car had been serviced as claimed this would have been brought to the attention of the driver and properly repaired.

We went through a period where every time you turned a sharp corner the dash display would light up and flicker like a disco.

The display would then go blank, and if you had to stop, everything would die and you would have to wait for it to run through its systems and come back – a real fun time and again preventable.

The steering suddenly went wonky and we found that the control arm bolt had been inserted upside down.

It had worked loose and because there was no gravitational assistance to keep it attached to the control arm it became really scary. If this had happened at speed it could have caused a huge accident, putting our lives and the lives of other road users in jeopardy.

At some point there had been some damage to the radiator and the hole had been welded.

This gave way and we had to replace the radiator and the water pump.

I have attempted to get to the truth several times but Zee (the person who placed the advert on Gumtree) insists that there was no major damage to the car.

He said it had previously belonged to the wife of a farmer in Limpopo, and that he had collected the car and driven it to Joburg.

The vehicle has been abused and has never been serviced.

About two weeks after I bought my car, “Zee” was again advertising a Smart on Gumtree. He seems to do it as an alternative source of income.