The viewing and the test drive

The purpose of a viewing is not to confirm that you like the car. You already like it or you would not have driven there. The purpose is to find the reasons not to buy it, and that only works if you set the conditions rather than the seller.

Set the conditions

Daylight, and dry. Citizens Advice makes this point first for good reason: artificial light and a wet body panel hide paint defects, ripples, filler and mismatched panels. Damp also disguises the smell of a leak.

A genuinely cold engine. Ask the seller not to warm the car up before you arrive, and touch the bonnet when you get there. A cold start is where worn timing chains, tired batteries, injector faults and exhaust smoke reveal themselves; a warm engine tells you almost nothing. This is the single most commonly conceded check and the most valuable one.

At the seller’s address. For a private sale, meet at their home. Citizens Advice recommends it explicitly, because it gives you a record of where they live if something goes wrong afterwards. A private seller who wants to meet in a car park is a private seller who may not be one.

The walk round

• Panels and paint in daylight, sighting along the body. Ripples, orange peel, overspray on rubber seals and mismatched shades mark repairs.
• Panel gaps, which should be even and symmetrical side to side.
• Tyres. The legal minimum tread for a car is 1.6 mm across the central three quarters of the tread and around the entire circumference. Below that carries a fine and penalty points — per tyre. Look also at whether they match across each axle, and at wear that is uneven across the tread, which points at suspension geometry rather than driving style. On a four-wheel-drive car, mismatched tyres are a mechanical problem as well as a legal one.
• Brakes, seen through the wheels: a pronounced lip at the outer edge of a disc means it is near the end of its life.
• Lights. Every one. Lighting and signalling is the largest single category of MOT failure, and the reason is usually a blown bulb nobody checked.
• Underneath, with a torch. Corrosion, fresh underseal hiding it, fluid on the ground, and anything shiny and new on an otherwise weathered car.

Inside

Work through every switch, screen and motor: windows, mirrors, seats, air conditioning on both hot and cold, heated seats, the infotainment through an actual task rather than a splash screen, and every warning light going out as it should after start-up. On modern cars the electronics are where most owner-reported faults live.

Then compare interior wear against the odometer. A worn driver’s seat bolster, a polished steering wheel rim and worn pedal rubbers on a low-mileage car is the classic prompt to read the MOT mileage history again.

The drive

Long enough to matter, and varied. You want low speed in traffic, a sustained pull at speed and some rough surface.

• From cold: any rattle in the first seconds, any smoke, any hesitation.
• Gearbox: clean engagement of reverse, clean pull away, shifts that are firm rather than slurred or jerky. On a dual-clutch box, repeated pull-aways in traffic are the test.
• Steering: straight ahead without correction, no vibration through the wheel under braking.
• Brakes: pull up straight, no pulsing, no travel to the floor.
• Suspension: knocks over broken tarmac, with the radio off.
• At the end: park it, leave the engine running, and look underneath for anything dripping. On a car with air suspension, leave it standing and come back to see whether a corner has settled.

Do not be rushed

Every pressure technique in a used-car sale is a variant of shortening the time you spend looking. A seller who is fine with a cold start, a long drive and a torch under the sills is telling you something useful. So is one who is not.