9:00 am, January 19, 2025
They say that, in life, there are no things more certain than death or taxes – though those who know me will tell you that I’ve spent several years avoiding both against the odds (allegedly, anyway).
And a bit like that kid off the film, Sixth Sense, these days I see dead people. Don’t worry, I’m not having weird supernatural visions – I may be bonkers, but I’m not a total fruitcake. It’s more that I’ve learned from various tell-tale signs how to spot when one of them is selling a car.
Since taking the decision a couple of years ago to stop selling dross and focusing instead on the enthusiast car market, I’ve been a lot more choosy with both my customers and the cars that I take into stock.
No longer do I waste hours filling out finance applications that I can tell from the customers’ appearance will be rejected (call me judgemental, but when someone who can only stump up their PIP allowance as a wage slip and looks like they haven’t had a bath since the Romans invented them tries to buy a high mileage BMW X1, it’s never going to end in a sale…). Instead, I buy cars as old bangers and I punt them out as ‘Modern Classics’.
You can’t just buy any old rubbish, though. The vast majority of 20-year-old cars are on their last legs, of that make no mistake. But then there’s the odd one floating around that the most recent owner bought themselves as a retirement gift, or as something to tuck away in the garage and only use for weekly trips to Waitrose. These are the cars I actively seek out, and the majority come from dead people.
Without naming names, one auction house I use over in the Black Country acquires a good chunk of its stock via a car buying service offered by its parent company, which will buy any old junk (you’ve guessed already, haven’t you?), but interspersed with all the council estate touring cars that were no doubt cashed in to get this week’s electricity/rent/score (delete as appropriate) is the odd absolute gem, such as the lovely pale green Rover 75 I flipped a few weeks before Christmas, bought by me for less than the cost of my works Christmas do, for which there were only three guests.
It returned me a good couple of bags of profit, all of it thanks to the subliminal messages sent to me by its deceased previous owner. After all, these car buying services are often a lifeline to those needing to clear the effects of a late relative.
Among the clues were the radio, tuned into BBC Radio 3, the climate control display set to Fahrenheit rather than Celsius, a pocket bible and a 2002 AA Road Atlas, none of which you’d expect to find in a car belonging to a spring chicken.
In the boot were a precautionary spade, some cardboard and a torch, all unused because the underside and sills of the car told me it had never gone out in the snow, along with a pristine Haynes Workshop Manual, the only mark on which was on the page telling you how to change a headlight bulb, which was folded over in the corner.
Then there was the previous owner’s name on some of the invoices that came with the car. There aren’t many under-50s called Bernard, so I googled the name and found funeral details for a recently deceased local councillor on Facebook.
Through sleuthing and detective work (with the assistance of Google Maps), I found out that the car lived on the driveway of a detached bungalow, with brown curtains of a clearly 1970s design and a very neat lawn, suggesting that Bernard was the kind of chap who liked to look after his things and make them last.
The car was an absolute testimony to him as well – spotless inside and out, clearly regularly cleaned and polished, and serviced every year on as close as possible to its date of registration.
Owners like him don’t exist anymore – but that’s a good thing, as with an eagle eye on the auction listings, it means I’m hungrily buying up all their cars, most of them Jaguars, Rovers, Volvos or Mercs. There’s decent business in that – and you get to avoid the knuckle draggers, as well.
