Lesson 15
Viewing a Used Car
Use the MOT history, warning lights, a cold start, the tyres and the clutch to decide whether to buy, negotiate or walk away.
Read the car’s history before you go
Hannah has £5,000 and a free Saturday. The advert that caught her eye is a nine-year-old manual diesel estate at £4,200, with 38,000 miles on the clock, used mostly for short local trips. Almost everything in this course is about to be useful at once.
She starts before she leaves the house. For a car tested in Great Britain, the MOT history is public, looked up by registration on GOV.UK: every past result, every advisory and the mileage recorded at each test. Advisories that repeat year after year, or a mileage that goes backwards, are questions to ask. She asks the seller for the service records, and for one more thing: please don’t run the car before she arrives, so she can see it start from cold.