Is a pre-purchase
inspection worth it?

The money is not really spent on finding a disaster. It is spent on the far more common outcome: a list of what needs doing, which is either a reason to negotiate or a reason to walk.

What two hours actually finds

A buyer looking at a car for twenty minutes sees paint, mileage and whether it starts. Two hours with the wheels off and a diagnostic plugged in sees considerably more.

• Fault codes, including pending ones the dashboard has not shown yet.
• Brake and tyre life, measured rather than eyeballed.
• Corrosion, leaks and previous accident repair from underneath.
• Whether the service history matches what the seller believes it does.
• How it actually drives, which is the part photographs cannot convey.

What it cannot tell you

It is an inspection, not a prophecy. We cannot say what will fail next month, and we cannot dismantle somebody else’s car to look deeper.

We also cannot tell you whether the price is fair in the market — only what condition the car is in. Those are different questions and it is worth keeping them apart.

Findings that should stop a sale

1. Evidence of structural repair after an accident that was not declared.
2. A mileage discrepancy between the car, the record and the HPI check.
3. Outstanding finance, which means the car is not the seller’s to sell.
4. Serious corrosion on structural areas rather than surface rust underneath.

Everything else is usually a negotiation. A list of four hundred pounds of work is a reason to offer four hundred pounds less, not automatically a reason to leave.

Is it worth it on a cheap car?

Often more so. At the cheap end the gap between a good example and a bad one is proportionally larger, and there is far less margin for an expensive surprise.

Most of our inspections pay for themselves in the negotiation alone. The ones that pay for themselves ten times over are the ones where somebody walks away, and those are more common than you would hope.