including scrape

Well I did. Twice!!

Buying a used car in Spain is not as easy as in England, or as cheap. We had already spent days looking at cars. They had looked perfectly promising in the ad, but they were always disappointing in the flesh. Most of them had more than their fair share of bumps and scrapes, and they all looked and felt tired and worn out. Plus, I had read about people who had bought a Spanish car only to find it wasn’t legal. Not sure exactly what it meant, but it certainly worried me.

The car I had liked most was a 14 year old Mercedes 230 LE. Even with its bumps and scrapes, it still managed to look impressive. And it had leather seats! I didn’t buy it because the guy was from Russia and looked decidedly shifty and uncomfortable. Salomé, who is our ‘sixth sense alert’ didn’t like him at all.

In the end, we picked an ad from a local dealer, for a 9 year old Opel Corsa with a reasonable price tag, for Spain at least. When we got there, the car had “just been sold” of course, but he was eager to show us a Seat Ibiza. It was a little more expensive, but it had no visible bumps and scrapes! Plus, they had done a proper valeting job on it, so it looked like new, both inside and out. This impressed Greys immensely, so we took it for a drive. It handled OK, sort of, and the little engine was responsive enough, even though it was a little noisy. “You won’t need to spend any money on it for a long time” said Carlos, and I wanted to believe him. It certainly looked clean. So, we decided to buy it. The girl in the office was from Honduras and very friendly and Greys had a good chat with her. We were feeling positive.

Just as we were about to drive off, Carlos informed me that the central locking system didn’t work properly and that you had to push a button on the driver side door to open the other doors. He would fix it for us free of charge if we came by again tomorrow. My heart sank a little, but we decided to stay positive. After all, the car was very clean.

I opened my door, found the button and pushed it down. And down it went, completely disappearing into the door, never to be seen again. Oh dear…  I started the car and moved the gear stick into first. Something fell off. Where had it gone? Greys found it again. It was the little diagram on top of the gear stick. I tried to click it back into place, but it had obviously just been stuck on with super glue. “Another thing for Carlos to fix tomorrow,” I thought, and bent over to the glove compartment to store it. The handle promptly broke and it wouldn’t open. I looked at Greys. She started laughing. “Have you seen the film Matilda?”, she said. Of course I had. I remembered the scene in which Matilda’s dad (played by Danny DeVito) joyfully demonstrates how he buys old bangers and gives them a bit of a makeover so they look like new. Of course as soon as his customers drive off with their shiny new cars, they start malfunctioning and falling apart. I had to agree that the similarity seemed striking. Had we been had? “Let’s go home and sleep on it. Maybe it won’t seem so bad in the morning.”

our 'new' Punto

The next morning I realised we had definitely bought the wrong car. I took it for a little ride and I started to hear all sorts of little noises I hadn’t noticed the day before. We decided to go and see Carlos and ask for our money back. Has anyone ever gotten their money back from a used car salesman I wonder… Carlos didn’t seem too thrilled about the idea and offered to part-exchange the disappointing Seat for one of his many other cars, all much more expensive of course.

It took a whole day before he finally offered us the 5 door Fiat Punto he had just bought for himself. No make-over, not totally clean inside, but when I took it for a test, I immediately liked it. This was a real car, with proper buttons that worked and didn’t feel like they were about to break or fall off. We had to haggle about the price, but we got there in the end.

We have now had 3 happy days driving around in our ‘new’ Fiat Punto. It drives like a dream, better than the new cars we had been hiring.

The motto of this story?

Don’t buy from a used car salesman…

… unless you are buying his car.