It doesn’t pay to be a perfectionist when buying a used car

Despite a recent decline there are still well over 31 million cars on the UK’s roads today despite the recession (depression, downturn, austerity measures etc) rising fuel prices and soaring maintenance costs. The Public transport system, despite massive investment and in fairness much improvement, citizens are still opting for owning and renting cars rather than relying on trains and buses to get them to where they want to go.

Car clubs such as Streetcar are growing in popularity in city centres as they allow people to pick and choose when they wish to drive somewhere without the associated costs of car ownership. There will be over 5 million new and used cars sold in the UK this year and luckily for us the quality and performance of these cars has never been so good, but car dealers are increasingly being faced with ever more demanding customers who are being advised not to buy a used car that has had any kind of paintwork damage.

With the sheer volume of cars on the road it is estimated that somewhere in the region of 70% of them will have had some kind of bodywork repair from a simple smart repair to a full blown re-spray and its certainly unrealistic to expect otherwise.

If the paint job has been carried out correctly with the right materials it never needs to be a problem and will never adversely affect the value or condition of the car. Of course the ones to be wary of are where the work is shoddy or significant enough to warrant a large insurance claim.

Car dealers are telling us that buyers are coming into used car showrooms buying cars and then trying to reject them on the basis that some kind of repair has been carried out and thus eroding the buyers confidence in the vehicle even though the repair may have been purely cosmetic, like a minor scratch or bumper and wing mirror scuff. Defects which will have no bearing on the functionality of the vehicle and will present absolutely no safety risk to the driver whatsoever.

Unfortunately buyers maybe missing out on a decent car purely because they want the car they buy to be perfect and imagine that because a car has been sprayed that it is somehow inferior.

The reality is it is virtually impossible to buy a used car that hasn’t had any kind of damage whatsoever.