Standing stiffness?
▶ Cars are designed to be used, not stand about. Idleness means batteries lose charge, tyres lose pressure, brake discs acquire a surface coating of corrosion which can be heard when the car’s moved, and everything generally gets stiff. And, of course, a car that’s left outside usually gets grubby.
This is a particular problem for traders as sales cars do tend to stand about a bit between being traded in by the previous owner and driven from you by the new one. That car you bought at auction yesterday could easily have taken a month or more to pass through the various stages of trade to reach! Then, it’s far from unusual for your sale to take several weeks. Or even months, if you’ve inadvertently bought something that turns out to be a bit of a landmark...
This can sometimes present a bit of a problem. A grubby-looking car with squashy tyres and which needs a jump-start to go hardly gives a good impression to potential purchasers. Equally though, if you’ve got more than three or four cars in stock, it can be awkward to keep them all ready to go at a moment’s notice.
So, your natural inclination, when a call comes through that someone wants to come and view immediately, is to go out and get it running and warmed up before the customer comes. That’s usually fine.
Sometimes, though, a car that’s been started immediately before a customer arrives arouses suspicion. Are you trying to hide a fault such as tricky starting, a lingering warning light, or a bit of endyengine rattle? Though things like this – and the last one in particular – are less common these days, people’s prejudices tend to last longer than whatever triggers them.
So what’s best? My advice, frankly, is to make sure as far as you can, that any car which you are advertising for sale is ready for sale at any time, and watch out for things like slowly-deflating tyres due to alloy rim corrosion. Avoid, too, letting a battery go completely flat. Modern lithium-type boost chargers are a lot more convenient to use (and carry less risk of damage when you’re rushing) than old-school mains-powered boost boxes, but they don’t work unless the battery has some residual charge. A weekly blast round the block will also remove brake rust. This is important as most retail customers don’t have a trader’s technical knowledge, and many will assume nasty-sounding scraping on move-off means big issues.
All this is fine in theory, but of course there will always be times when a customer wants to view, ‘now’, a car that hasn’t moved for a while. In such a case, I always tell the buyer you’ll be ‘getting the car out of storage’ for them, so they aren’t surprised to see it’s been moved.
Should a customer still raise ‘why have you started it?’ issues, offer the chance to “come back later, and see/hear it start from cold if you want to.”the likelihood of anyone actually doing this is prettymuch nil, but by making the offer you’re making clear that you aren’t trying to hide anything, and that will usually be enough to satisfy people.