BEHIND THE WHEEL: Seeing is believing when it  comes to buying a used car

Hi JM,

I greatly enjoy your intuitive and humorous column; please keep it coming.

I have been shopping for a used car online (Kenyan sites) and I am pretty much baffled by descriptions posted by sellers. Please help demystify and debunk these terms:  

1. Lady driven: Is there any proof that women are better drivers/maintainers of motor vehicles?

2. Asian or expatriate owned: Same question as 1 above, and does this group drive on better roads than the rest of us?

3. Mint condition: For a car that is 10+ years old, what does it mean?!

4. Fully-loaded car: This one is thrown around like confetti at an Italian wedding.

5. Very low mileage:  Talking about a 15-year-old car that looks well worn, are we this dishonest in our business dealings? Is there any way of knowing whether the odometer has been tampered with?

6. Never involved in an accident: Not even a fender bender in so many years of use in a country where people are dropping like flies from road traffic accidents?

I think a little honesty would go a long way.

Moha

Hello Moha,

Ah, the notorious sales pitch. These run the gamut from the brutally honest, through the variously massaged half-truths, to outright lies. It is a form of psychological warfare against weak-minded consumers to lure them into a decision they might otherwise steer clear of. Now, how to sift the little nuggets of non-alternative facts from the boiling morass of shameless fibbing?

1. Lady-driven: there is no proof that women are better at driving or maintaining a vehicle; if anything, from observation, I’d say sometimes the opposite is true. I have seen women flatten bumps and skim over potholes like they didn’t exist. I know of one who drove a Vitz into an early grave because she had no idea that engine oil should be changed every so often. Women are also more likely to get into accidents of omission while men lean towards accidents of commission. Let me explain.

There is a tendency for some women  drivers to exit junctions, change lanes or merge into highways without performing their due diligence in looking around (again, from observation). These perpetrators usually know they are doing something wrong because they will blatantly refuse to establish eye contact with the drivers they are offending. This in turn makes them susceptible to falling victim to speeding drivers, who then proceed to plough into them in a metal-bending orgy that instantly degenerates into a festival of insults, traffic jams, police reports and angry phone calls to insurance companies. While a woman  is unlikely to drive into you, she, is likely to put herself in a position to be banged (pun intended). This is an error of omission, the omission of appropriate reaction to one’s immediate environment.

Now, the men. Men’s sins of commission arise from the fact that we are psychologically wired since the mastodon-hunting prehistoric era to be wild and carefree risk takers. We actively cause accidents by “experimenting” with manoeuvres that sometimes fail, be it underestimating the available overtaking opportunity or by reaching for the far corners of the speedometer or by trying to drift through a roundabout, to name but a few. The probability of such a happy-go-lucky male driver ramming a lady driver who flatly refuses to look at him or recognise his speedy approach tends towards one, mathematically speaking.

That said, gender-based decisions on whether or not a vehicle is a good buy is rubbish. It does make sense to assume that a female driver will have driven and taken care of her car better than a reckless male, because women do tend to be more fastidious about how they do things or how they maintain their property.

Do a random survey and ask any group of individuals to show you their mobile phones. What are the odds that a higher number of males will show you a barely functional plastic lump with a cracked screen held together by chewing gum and rubber bands? Very high.

It also makes sense that a man will have taken better care of his car because, by nature, we are fascinated by machines and engineering, and we do tend to cherish our vehicles to such abnormal levels as plastering names on our chariots (Katya) and referring to them as “she” (Please stop doing this, fellow men. The next person to tell me, “She purrs nicely on idle” had better be talking about a woman with apnea and not a random, 4-cylinder Japanese white good).

See where I’m going with this? It is a cyclic redundancy error, an infinite loop; just arguing in circles: drivers and owners are drivers and owners, be they male or female. If an ad says “lady driven”, skip that part and read the rest of the details. It means absolutely nothing.

2. Asian/Expatriate-owned: This is a thinly-veiled racist attribution to motor vehicle ownership, and it burns my fingertips having to type this out, but here goes, anyway. The Kenyan Asian community tends to be well-off in comparison to historical denizens. This translates to them living in nicer places with better roads, so they are less likely to break their cars, unlike the unfortunate lot which has to navigate its way through a waterlogged lunar landscape to get to their houses (I’m looking at you, Eastlands dwellers).

The inherent “wealthiness” of the Asian community means that they also have the pecuniary ability to take better care of their cars. We who occupy the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder push our cars until the transmission falls out from underneath and the engine gives up the ghost in a hissy fit and a cloud of steam. We then find the cheapest nearby mechanic who has access to the cheapest available parts dealer and then instigate an unstoppable chain of events that culminates in a tearful e-mail to the Nation Media Group with, “Dear Baraza, please help me” as the opening tag line.

An expatriate-owned vehicle is sold on the premise that  the said expatriate drove a company car, so it was maintained from the company’s purse, which in most cases tends to be bottomless. Think of it as a corporate version of the Asian theory above.

I’ll be honest and admit that I seriously dislike discussing these particular tactics of motor vehicle salesmanship, because I do have numerous female, Asian and expatriate friends and it is offensive to both them and me to look at things from a gender, racial or economic perspective. Profiling on any basis is the bane of any mixed-class society and the moment we start divvying up each other according to who visits which washroom, where our ancestors came from or what kind of monthly take-home we enjoy, then we start sliding down a slope in a tumble we will never recover from.

3. Mint condition: Finally, something inoffensive. Mint condition means “as good as new”; and this gives people a playing field with plenty of scope to bend the truth. It is a two-word summary for a thoroughly well-maintained vehicle, mileage notwithstanding, and it is possible even for cars that are 10 years old or more.

However, “mint condition” is a very subjective term. For some, “ran when parked” means as good as mint, while for others, mint means flawless and able to withstand the harshest scrutiny under any powerful magnifying glass.

4. Fully loaded: another avenue for chicanery. “Fully loaded” means having all the available bells and whistles, but this varies from car to car. A fully loaded Toyota Vitz is still specced rather poorly in comparison with  the lowliest Mercedes-Benz saloon. These words are thrown about with the hope that you don’t trawl Wikipedia reading the spec levels available for every single car that exists, to the point that when someone sells you a “fully loaded” Subaru Outback from the mid-90s, you look askance at them and demand to be shown the double sunroof before you go native on their dishonest tails.

“Fully loaded” is usually less than fully accurate because rarely will people spec their brand new cars with every available option, including those they didn’t need, and what you inherit in the nebulous pseudo-hand-me-down atmosphere of “previously cherished” hardware is fully dependent on the original owner and not you.

But then again, if you saw an ad saying “Mostly Loaded”, you’d be suspicious, wouldn’t you?

5. Very Low Mileage: Blame the auction houses and the concours events for this. Barely-driven examples of desirable cars change hands at obscene amounts of money, so the assumption is this effect will trickle down to breadline motor cars.

It doesn’t.

I won’t even go into the details of this; I will instead paraphrase ex-Top Gear’s James May: keeping your mileage low on a vehicle to maintain its resale status is like refusing to consummate your relationship with your comely girlfriend so as to make her next boyfriend happy. There is also a risk attached to an undriven vehicle. Remember the late Paul Walker? The Porsche Carrera GT he met his end in had tyres that were nine years old. Nine. This was clearly a car that was rarely driven, and was most likely on its original tyres. Tyres degrade over time, as does engine oil, and the scientists behind the manufacture of these two carbon-based products designed them in such a way that they last longer under use and deteriorate when idle. The CGT had rotting tyres that, more likely than not, contributed to the vehicle wiping out at 140km/h and killing the two occupants.

That said, mileage is usually among the last things to check on a car you plan to buy from the pre-owned yard. As you said, you could be looking at a low mileage vehicle that looks like it just spent a rough week being pushed through Satan’s alimentary canal. The few miles it has might have been traumatic ones. What now?

Then again you might have a lovingly cared for example that was driven like it should have been and boasts large values in its odometer readout, but still runs like a dream. Which would you rather buy? I’d buy the more decent but frequently used car, which is exactly what I did in January last year.

6. Never involved in an Accident:

 this one is fairly crucial, to be honest. Nobody wants a car that has been involved in an accident, and there are several good reasons for this:

a) The accident might  have been serious enough to do some subcutaneous damage, such as twisting/bending the chassis or weakening the structure and the repairs were only cosmetic or not comprehensive enough to restore the frame back to factory condition. This makes the car either look odd from some angles, or if the plastic surgery was expert enough, the car might  look okay but is dangerous to drive or have another accident in.

b) The accident might be unresolved. Perhaps it was a hit-and-run, which means you are availing yourself of “hot” property. The police could be looking for you now, or worse still, the vehicle might have committed an infraction that resulted in emotive reactions – infractions such as running over a child (for your own sake, never ever run down a child. Don’t. You’d rather crash the car and hope the airbags work; but do not hit a child). My own father narrates tales from his days in employment at the state’s former telecommunications hegemony where reckless drivers would run over people in remote areas, with the result that the company’s vehicles were immediately declared “automobilia non grata” in those areas, areas whose locals solemnly swore to raze the company vehicles  to the ground or murder the drivers if they ever caught up with any of them. This could apply here as well; if that vehicle has any pending cases with frustrated plaintiffs, the said plaintiffs will not be very polite if they come across you in it.

c) Personal pride: A used car might  be a symptom of being an outsider to the 1 per cent family, but there is still a substantial amount of money being exchanged in its purchase either way. It’s not unreasonable to want something unsullied, is it?

Conclusion: Just look past the blurb and go for the hard facts. Read the spec and the price to see if one justifies the other, then go and have a physical look at the car in question before you decide on your purchase. Do not believe the hype.

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