Four owners in six years, four part exchanges, back to my forecourt every time. Every one of them told me it was a lovely car. Not one of them would look at it while they said so.
I have a pitch off the ring road with room for nineteen cars.
That is small. I am not a garage, I am a dealer, which means I buy at auction and from the trade and privately, I get things through an MOT and a service, I put them on the forecourt and on the usual websites, and I sell them. Two of us. Me and a lad called Danny who does the valeting and half the selling and who is better at it than I am.
Nineteen cars, about a hundred and forty a year through the books.
Cars come back sometimes. That is normal and I want that understood before anything else. Somebody buys a Fiesta off you in March and their circumstances change and they are back in September wanting to part exchange it against something bigger, and if they liked you the first time they come to you rather than to the man down the road. It is a good sign, not a bad one.
Once. Maybe twice with a car that suits a certain kind of buyer.
This one has been four times.
I am going to call it the estate, because I have decided not to give the make and model, and you will understand why by the end.
Silver estate, 2011, diesel, the sort of car that is bought by people who have a dog or a caravan or a job that involves ladders. Nothing about it is remarkable. There are half a million of them.
I bought it at auction in Gloucester in the spring of 2019 for two thousand one hundred pounds.
Full service history, two former keepers, ninety one thousand on it, and a clean HPI. I remember it well because it drove better than it had any right to for the money and Danny said we would have that away in a week, and we did.
Sold to a woman I will call the first one. She had it for eleven months.
She came back in the February.
She wanted something smaller and she wanted it that day, and she took a Corsa off me and gave me the estate back, and the numbers were the numbers and everybody was happy.
She was not happy.
I want to be careful because this is where people start filling things in. She was not distressed. She was not crying. She was a woman of about sixty who wanted to change her car and who conducted the whole thing perfectly normally and who, when I said the usual thing you say, which is has it been all right for you, said: it is a lovely car.
And looked at the Corsa while she said it.
That is all. I did not think about it for a second at the time. I have thought about it for six years since.
It went out again in the March to a young couple. They had it fourteen months.
They came back in the May of the following year and he did the talking and she stood by the gate, outside, on the pavement, and she did not come onto the pitch. He said they wanted something with a bit more room, which is a strange thing to want instead of an estate, and I said so, in a joking way, because that is the job.
He said, it is a lovely car.
He was looking at the price sticker on the windscreen of the thing next to it.
They took a people carrier that was a worse car and cost them more and I let them have it because he was very clearly not going to be talked into keeping the estate.
Third time was a man on his own, had it about two years, longest of the lot. Came back wanting a van.
Fourth time was another couple and that one lasted five months.
And each time the same three things.
They came to me. Not to the retail parks, not to a main dealer, not to the man with the sixty cars on the bypass. Two of them drove past two other pitches to get to mine.
They part exchanged rather than sold it privately, which is the expensive way to do it, and every one of them took less money than they would have got on the open market to make it my problem instead of theirs.
And every single one of them said it is a lovely car and none of them looked at it.
The paperwork is where it stops being a feeling.
I keep everything, because you have to, and because HMRC will ask. So I have the V5C slips and the sales invoices and the part exchange appraisals for all four rounds, and one evening in the January before last I got the file out and laid it on the desk in order.
The appraisal form has a box for mileage.
March 2019, bought at auction: 91,340. February 2020, back from the first owner: 97,102. May 2021, back from the couple: 103,988. July 2023, back from the man: 112,410. December 2023, back from the second couple: 118,006.
That is fine. That is a car being used.
The MOT history is public. You can put any registration into the government website and get every test that car has ever had, with the mileage the tester wrote down, going back years.
I did that, expecting to check my own numbers.
There are tests on that car in 2016 and 2017 and 2018, before I ever owned it, and the mileages are 104,880, and 111,300, and 117,640.
I have sat with that for a long time.
The car had a hundred and seventeen thousand on it in 2018. I bought it at auction in 2019 with ninety one thousand on it and a clean history check, and a clean check means the mileage has not been flagged as inconsistent, and that check is done against the MOT record, which is the same record I was looking at.
I rang the check company. They ran it again and it came back clean again and the woman read the MOT mileages out to me over the phone and they were my mileages. 91,340 in 2019. 97,102 in 2020.
I said what about 2018.
She said the test in 2018 is 117,640.
I said that is higher than 2019.
She said yes.
And then she said, in a slightly different voice, that she would flag it to be looked at, and about ten days later I got an email saying the record had been reviewed and no discrepancy had been found.
I have not been able to make myself do anything about it, and I have thought about why.
Part of it is that it is not illegal to sell a car whose paperwork disagrees with itself in a way nobody official will acknowledge. Part of it is that I have sold that car four times and made money on it four times and it has never once come back with a fault.
That is the other thing I have not said.
It has never come back with a fault. Not a warning light, not a noise, not a leak. It goes through its MOT with an advisory about a tyre. Danny says it is the best car we have ever had through the place, and he has stopped saying that in front of me because of the face I make.
It is on the pitch now.
It has been on the pitch for fourteen months, which for us is unheard of, because a car that does not sell in ten weeks goes to auction and gets somebody else's problem. This one has been listed and delisted twice and I have not sent it.
I have not sent it and I could not tell you why.
Danny keeps it at the back now, by the fence, and he moves it once a fortnight so the tyres do not flat spot, and last month I watched him do it out of the office window.
He got in and started it and moved it four feet and got out.
Then he stood by the open door for a bit, looking at the office, and then he shut the door and walked back up the pitch, and when he came in I asked him what he had been doing and he said he had not been doing anything.
The mileage on it this morning is 118,041.
Thirty five miles since December 2023.
Danny has moved it about forty times, four feet at a time.