buying a car..

buying at auction.. I'm sure you will have heard stories in the pub, that so and so's mate went to a car auction for the very first time and couldn't believe how cheap the prices were, and how he bought an immaculate, low mileage 3 year old BMW 328 coupe in silver metallic with leather and air con for £39.50. Just goes to show what robbing bastards the garage trade must be. It's a nice story, but in reality, it just isn't like that.

Modern car auctions are very efficient at disposing of large numbers of unwanted vehicles quickly, and for sure there are lots of good cars going under the hammer. There are even bargains to be had. But what about the dozens of hard-nosed professional trade buyers who consider the jungle of the car auction to be their natural habitat? How come they miss all of these mega bargains? My experience is that they don't miss much, because that's their job and they tend to be pretty good at it. Rather than bemoaning the fact that they have just been taken out by a complete auction novice, the professionals are more often seen wetting themselves laughing at the tyro in the seats (for some reason Private Man always sits down) with the Hawaiian shirt and a copy of Parker's Guide who, encouraged by the surprisingly helpful auctioneer, doesn't realise he has been bidding against himself for at least 10 minutes.

The end result is that the auctioneer (whose main qualification, apart from having a nice suit and perfect peripheral vision, is that he was asked to leave a career selling time shares because he was too devious) has eased the Hawaiian shirt in to a car that a twoccer wouldn't be seen dead in and got him to part with £2000 more than he needed to for the privilege. It is worth remembering that Private Man is meat and drink to any self respecting auctioneer, and the chance of removing the shirt of an unsuspecting punter is often the only reason the man with the gavel gets up in the morning.

The auction stories you tend not to hear about concern the hundreds of unprepared, inexperienced and gullible individuals who every week, in auctions up and down the country, end up paying way over the odds for the lemons we mentioned earlier. To make matters worse, if that unbelievable bargain turns out to be a complete dog, and in trade terms that's about 2 levels down from an absolute lemon, with all four wheels pointing in different directions, you will start to experience the early symptoms of the ailment known as galloping buyer's remorse. This is a similar feeling to the drinker's 'whirling pit' with all the sweat and nausea that entails, but with the addition of a stabbing pain in the area of your wallet. At this point you will find that your chances of undoing the deal with the auctioneer are slim verging on anorexic. You will also find that your Latin vocabulary improves in leaps and bounds as you grapple with the auctioneer's favourite term, 'caveat emptor'. This translates into the really helpful 'let the buyer beware'. This of course is exactly what you want to hear when it is slowly dawning on you that you have possibly just made the worst buy in the history of the universe. In an ideal world Caveat Emptor would be the brand name of an instant laxative. Anyone who has bought from auction and regretted it, and I'm including many in the trade, will recognise the symptoms all too well. 

By now you really should be having second thoughts about the inexperienced buying at car auctions - and if you have read this far you probably still want to know just exactly where do the good cars end up. The answer is quite simple - mostly on dealer's forecourts - snaffled by the hard-nosed professional buyers referred to earlier. Once again this brings us neatly on to buying from a dealer  


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