Originally Posted by Laird Scooby
If i was to buy it, i'd book it for MoT locally on the afternoon of collection then collect in the morning, drive it back to my area and straight in for MoT - pass or fail i'm legally covered all the way then.
However, given the fact it's stood for 6 months plus, there is a good chance the brakes may have siezed on (especially the handbrake if it's been used), if it's been parked on grass, it could be as rotten as a 3-week old curry left in the sun.
Also electrical contacts may have oxidised making certain things not work so there could be a lot of silly problems that would make it a risk driving to the MoT station, whether near or far from the pick up point.
For someone who lives in/near Canterbury and has a favourite MoT station nearby, not a problem. They've just bought the car, taking it for a prearranged test and then home to either repair and retest or straight into use, depending on the result of the test.
You and i both know all of this and also that there's a fair chance that aside from a bulb failure or similar, it would go more or less straight through the test, especially if it had a bit of a drive to help get the brakes back to moving/working as they should.
However the general buying public would view it simply as a 30 ish year old car that needs collecting on a trailer or similar, pushing the price up by £200+++ making it a grand minimum to buy and get it home.
Even simply collecting it from where you are, you're looking at a minimum of a 350 mile round trip, call it 360 to make the maths easy and your vehicle to collect and drive back separately does 30mpg and assume the Volvo does 30mpg on the same run. That's 12 gallons for your vehicle to get there and back and 6 gallons to get this one back - 18 gallons at ~£6/gallon currently is another £108 just on fuel, without "incidentals" such as a quick feed/coffee at a motorway service station, about another £20 (Call it £22 for the maths) so up to £130 already. Granted you and a friend/partner/spouse may have had a day out but the cost remains.
Then there's the MoT of £54.85 so near as makes no odds, £185 by now. We're £15 short of the magic grand now and i'm sure that would probably go on a takeaway in the evening so you'd had a dinner without cooking.
Makes it an expensive gamble, if it needs £500 worth of repairs for the MoT it now holds £1500 of your hard-earned and even with an MoT and all polished up nicely, any dings/scratches attended to would still probably only be an £1800-2500 car, even with the lower mileage.
If you're buying it as a labour of love, that wouldn't be a problem but if the thought, however small, is in the back of your mind that one day you'd sell it and hope to make money, as it stands at the moment, you probably would but not much if at all.
|