I'm Fed Up With People Who Make Zero Effort To Sell Their Cars
It’s inevitable: following Christmas dinner every year, when I’m vegetating on the sofa in a stuffing-induced stupor, I’ll end up browsing the used car classifieds. For me, it’s just as much a tradition as the bad cracker jokes and brussel sprouts. Actually, scratch that last one, sprouts are the work of the devil.
Anyway, during 2017’s Christmas Day classifieds binge, I stumbled upon an incredible advert for an early Porsche Boxster. It had the full spec list. A detailed run-through of all the less-good bits. The dates and mileages for every single service the car’s ever had. The make and model of the tyres it’s currently wearing. Even the kind of oil it had at the last service.
It made me want to call the seller immediately to arrange a test drive. It made the car stand out against all the other low-priced Boxsters out there. And it also made me mad.
Why? Because used car adverts like this are a rarity: few sellers will go far beyond listing some of the spec, the mileage and some very vague description of the condition and service history. It’s shockingly common to see car adverts that are only a handful of words long, and if you venture in the dark world of Facebook ‘For Sale’ pages, it won’t take you long to find someone flogging a car without even saying what model it is or what kind of fuel it uses.
Most bizarre is when a car has been subjected to drastic modifications, but with no detail given by the seller as to what exactly has been done. What parts have been fitted? Who did the work?
It’s perhaps the most irksome when you see dealers only providing a short description of a car, followed by a load of copy/pasted text about how great said dealership is. It is literally their job to sell cars, and yet many suck at it.
Aside from your house, your car is likely to be the most expensive thing you’ll ever sell. So why can’t people put more effort into the adverts? The standard of English doesn’t even matter that much, so long as key details are there like comprehensive service information, when it last had new tyres and what they were, a description of the condition that goes beyond a single word like ‘good’ - you get the idea.
It’s not hard, and it’s not that time consuming, and yet I know that within seconds of firing up the classifieds, I’m going to get annoyed by crap adverts again. Anyone else feel this way?
Growing up on a diet of World Rally Championship highlights and lengthy Gran Turismo 2 sessions, a life in cars was as good as inevitable for Matt.
Comments
Some people just understand how to SELL a car i guess.
Learn to cook Brussels sprouts properly and you’ll never be annoyed by anything ever again!
Learn to taste properly and you’ll never eat brussel sprouts ever again!
I can cook bircher muesli
Also, I hate the obsession with mileage - it particularly seems to be more of a thing in the UK
Used car prices seem overly sensitive to mileage. Of course it kind of makes sense why and of course its nothing that the effect of supply and demand, but I wish buyers were more concerned with the actual state of the car, service history and so on, than the number on the odometer. It seems unfair that if someone who drove a car on motorways for 20k miles gets a lower price than someone who did endless hillstarts in city centre traffic jams for 10k miles
100,000 miles on track with abuse ≠ 100,000 miles of an old lady driving it
Maybe cars should record total engine revolutions instead of mileage
You’re from the UK a fair judgement is milage given that 95% of people don’t care about their cars, and I’ve been a man wash a 2017 Range Rover SVR with wire wool…
Rule of thumb: if something is missing from the advert, the seller is leaving it out for a reason!
And when you ask for our version of the MOT’s failure sheet, then suddenly “im selling it for my brother idk”
Exactly
That’s because AFAIK…
Trade Sellers: They know it’ll put you off, and they’ll lose their profits.
Private Sellers: Will be unable to get rid of it, and will have to resort to scrapping it.
(Yes, I have returned to CT.)
Yea, there are a lot of people who don’t care enough.
Hell, my advert, when I was selling my BMX for 150 euros, was more detailed than most of the used car ones.
I guess sometimes, particularly with shoddily modified cars, the sellers have to sell the car because they need money or their significant others have told them too, and they don’t really want to let it go so they don’t try very hard?
Or people like this: I know what i have no lowballers or dumb bids bladibla. How bout you stop acting like all of you buyers are idiots. Maybe then you’ll sell your overpriced sh#tbox
Well some people really hate their car and want to get rid of it as quick as possible
Best part about brief description sales is no registration in pictures, after a quick scan of it later on viewing: mileage inconsistent with MOT, CAT D etc. You get the point.
Lesson learnt: there should be a brief article about brief description sales, brief description are almost always a scam.
Matt Robinson Unfortunately, some people just aren’t very clever
yeah, the problem with common sense is that it isn’t common.