Buying at auction always carries an element of risk, and even experienced buyers can be caught out sometimes.
► As many of you have probably noticed, most Car Mechanics project cars are bought at auction. This is something I introduced during my 13-year tenure as Editor, and which the current ‘management’ has, I’m pleased to see, continued. Since the mid-1990s my own cars have also been sourced that way.
By and large, it works pretty well. But, and this is something you do need to have to bear in mind if considering it for the first time, buying at auction does carry an element of risk. You can control and lessen the risk by choosing carefully and reading what the descriptions say and don’t say, but whatever precautions you take, you can never rule out completely the possibility of buying a dud.
And when that happens, it’s invariably down to you to sort out. Even when an auction car is sold with a full mechanical report, you’ll have only a very limited time to register a complaint, and it’ll need to be pretty serious. In fact, you still may not have any comeback. For example, a British Car Auctions ‘Essentials Checks’ mechanical report is provided on a ‘no claims will be accepted’ basis as it’s meant to replace the sort of checks that traders would make at a live auction. A BCA Standard Mechanical Report allows you 48 hours or 500 miles from collection/delivery to make a claim, and that’s pretty generous by auction standards! I can recall rejecting only two cars in nearly 30 years – one was a clocker that had done 100k more than a warranted mileage, the other came with a service book which belonged to a totally different vehicle! Overall, once the hammer falls on your successful bid, it’s all yours, good or bad!
I don’t have a problem with this; auctions are a trade environment, and if you want to buy as traders do, then you have to accept that you are doing so on exactly the same terms. And because most traders buy several cars a week, they can factor in a percentage of losses. Some losses are a fact of life because some major problems just don’t show up in an auction environment.
It’s just happened to me, too
I’ve bought a 2006/56 Lexus GS 450h – that’s the hybrid version of course, and given the legendary Lexus equipment levels and reliability, these are always pretty desirable. This one, though, seemed especially so; 84,000 miles with two private owners (the last for ten years), 18 (yes eighteen) stamps of main dealer service history and it’s the high-spec SE-L version which comes with even more luxury kit including radar-operated cruise control. It was also a Grade 2 car. That’s good for an eight-year-old car, let alone one twice that age! So in short, it sounded like perfect retail stock.
With a car like this, the CAP price (even CAP clean) is theoretical-only, and the car was always going t
