John Simister
John ruminates on buying cars in the current climate
Buying sight unseen is a dangerous game, says John.
Afriend of mine has just bought a BMW X3 online, sight unseen, in the pandemicobliged way that people have recently been doing. He owns a Seventies Triumph Bonneville and is planning to acquire a Frogeye Sprite to restore with his son, so he’s a proper motor nut. Yet he bought an expensive nearly-new car without even seeing it, never mind trying it out.
To me, that’s madness. But it’s also becoming the new normal, as endless TV ads try to tell us. At least with new, or nearly-new, cars you’re likely to get what you’re expecting, and there are safety nets if you don’t. You can even return the car if you don’t like it, usually. Luckily my friend is pleased with his X3. Reading lots of magazine and trusted online reviews helped, he says, which is an encouraging vote of confidence for us in the motoring press. It also shows how similar cars have become to drive and to live with, to the extent that buyers are becoming ever less worried that their purchase won’t do the required job. Choose the brand, select the spec, click, collect. Done.
But the surprise is that the pandemic-fuelled rise in online buying seems to be spreading to classics. Business at new online auction houses is booming, even though we all know that a classic has had plenty of time and opportunity to deviate from the new-car script and pitfalls are everywhere. Have people still gone to see the cars before they buy, like they used to, or have the travel frustrations of the pandemic caused buying caution to evaporate?
Try before you buy
Unless you’re buying an immobile project, it’s surely a good idea to drive, or at the very least be driven in, a classic car before you buy it. Does the gearbox shift sweetly, and is it quiet? Does the clutch judder? Do the brakes pull the car up straight? Are there any rattles or untoward wind noise? Do the dampers damp, is the suspension free of clonks?
Even when buying a car at an auction in the normal way, you can’t answer these questions.
You can’t drive it, and sometimes you can’t even start it up to check for odd engine noises and worrying smoke. All these potential faults remain undiscovered. They can be put right, but there’ll be a cost, which is easy not to think about during the thrill of bidding. Almost any newly-bought classic car requires work, and the chances are that one bought in an auction will require more.
Probably like most of us, I look at many cars offered for auction. The new online auction sites, and some of the traditional auction houses that now embrace this new normal, show many photographs. Sometimes we are bombarded with hundreds of detail shots, all building up the notion of transparency, of nothing to hide. This is admirable, but be aware that it can also be an information overload that can blind you to faults that you might have noticed in the metal, had you been there.
Getting the full picture
For example, there might be an interior shot showing a tidy, complete cabin, everything fitting well, all surfaces sound. It’s an image with a boundary, and your mind fills in, with mental data of matching interior quality, what’s beyond the boundary. Sometimes, though, the shot is framed to just miss the trouble spot – a collapsed seat seat bolster, a scuffed door-top trim – leading you to perceive it, subconsciously, as trouble-free. Such manipulation by omission could well not be deliberate, but it’s annoying when discovered and it emphasises the need to see the car in the flesh.
Photographs tend to flatter cars, so if there’s anything that looks slightly amiss in the picture – the hint of a dull paint finish, a possibly-misaligned panel – you can bet it’s a lot worse in reality. Seldom is a car as good as it looks in the pics, although it can happen. The Peugeot 106 I bought for my daughter, unseen, back in 2004 was actually better.
Our parents taught us – me, anyway – to buy in haste, repent at leisure, and I’ve done plenty of repenting over the years. What’s obvious, though, is this. Something as complicatedly full of potential trouble as a classic car absolutely does not fit into the world of click-and-collect. So we should thank all the car-gods that, with COVID-19 restrictions gradually easing, we can get physical with our potential purchases again.