Car Dealers - Make Your Mind Up Time

I got my Yaris MOTed this week. It passed – which rather surprised me. In fact it nearly didn’t. I’d checked everything I reasonably could at the weekend and cleaned it up with the intention of getting a valuation. On the morning of the test I quickly checked the lights again and to my utter annoyance the licence plate light had blown. I checked the glove box but I was out of that size of bulb. However, I remembered that there was a car accessories place at the end of the road and I nipped down to pick up a spare. They were only 99p each so I bought 2 and also picked up a bottle of wax – it was probably a couple of quid more than I could buy off the internet but if it keeps my local parts shop in business it is money well spent. For all the money that can be saved online I really do value small businesses like this.

So the car passed it’s MOT. There were a couple of advisories regarding suspension bushes but nothing relating to the disturbingly unpredictable nature of the brakes at speed: the number plate light would have failed it, of course, so that is clearly a far greater risk to safety compared to being unable to stop at 70mph. Ideally I was looking at getting the car part-exchanged but I am really fed up with being offered derisory trade-ins from dealers. I rang up an auction house in Glasgow to get an idea of what I could expect at auction. They were very helpful but at first there was some confusion as to when the MOT expired (they quoted for July 2013 rather than July 2014). The difference was an astonishing £500 so my MOT fee of £25 (a dodgy online offer) was well worth the money. They quoted a figure of £1900 in average to £2200 in perfect condition. Given a couple of bits of flaking paintwork on the plastic bits I would be looking at the lower figure rather than the higher and taking into account the auction house fees I would realistically be looking at figure of £1700-£2000 so I could use this as a guide for a fair trade in price.

The next stage was to decide what I was going to buy. I arranged for test drives of the Auris and Yaris. The Auris really is a nice car after it’s recent remodelling but one feature really has put me off. No matter how I adjusted the seat I couldn’t get in a comfortable position without my head touching the roof. This is not a problem in the latest Yaris which is a much more grown up car than it used to be although not quite as refined as the Auris. I had a quick look around for suitable nearly new models but they don’t come cheap. In fact the nearly new Golfs in the base trim are not a dissimilar price and do everything that the Yaris does in the higher trim levels. I thought I would give the VW dealer another try.

I phoned the Volkswagen dealership in Stirling and the salesman was as helpful as ever – unfortunately, they had no petrol engined Golfs in stock. It’s a pity as I wouldn’t have minded putting some business their way but I returned to Autotrader to see what I could find. There seemed to be two possibilities: Other VW dealers around Glasgow and the Motorpoint car supermarket, also in Glasgow. I had a look on the Motorpoint website and they had a 9 month old model with 11,000 miles on the clock in “Steel Grey” - a colour which I couldn’t quite place; images on the internet didn’t really seem to help with this as it appeared as everything from a slightly darker silver through to near-black. Motorpoint didn’t actually have the car in Glasgow at that moment but offered to send me a valuation on the Yaris. I still wanted to have a try of the Golf before committing so I rang a VW dealer in Glasgow who had something similar in stock (also at a pretty reasonable price and in silver).

At the Glasgow dealership I was met by a young chap called Gary who took my details and also asked about possible trade-ins (which seems a rather back-to-front way of doing things). Anyway, I got in the Golf and had a fairly extensive test drive with Gary acting as navigator (and also as ballast as I was keen to test the car with a passenger on board). Having driven the hire Golf before I was keen to see how the car compared directly to the Toyotas – previously I had really just driven up and down the motorway to Dumfries. My first reaction was something of a disappointment as the car appeared to have practically no power – until I noticed that the rev-counter was barely above 1,000 rpm. Having been so used to the variable timed engines of Toyota and Honda, the VW is really quite a different beast with lots of low down torque but practically no top-end. It does red-line around 6,000 rpm but it doesn’t do anything much useful above 4,000 and the gears have been set very, very long – almost like the set-up of a turbo-diesel car but without the noise. Once I had taken this into account it drove rather nicely.

I checked the car over at the end of the test drive but I was quite sold on it. It’s not flashy, it’s not exactly a ball of fire to drive but it is refined and generally a nice place to be. I asked about what deal they were prepared to offer and it turned out that the trade-in price was about what the auction house quoted for a non-MOT vehicle. Having done my homework, I did have some ammunition to back up my case but I hate haggling. Just at that point, I had a spot of luck – Motorpoint texted me with a valuation of the Yaris: £1,800. This was bang on what I should have been expecting and I was tempted to walk out there an then but this did prompt the manager of the dealership to budge. They didn’t match the Motorpoint price exactly  but threw in extras like a free service and tank of fuel which made the cost to change almost identical (within £50 anyway). What clinched it, though, was that I asked the salesman to show me what “Steel Grey” looked like. It’s battleship grey. I may be colour blind but I’m not going to be stuck with something that dreary.

I’m meant to be picking the car up on Tuesday night. I’m looking forward to it although I have a few reservations as to what the reliability of VW is like compared to Toyota. From the surveys I’ve seen the Golf VI doesn’t seem that different from similar Toyotas in terms of reliability (at least for the base models) but I don’t know whether VW are as good to deal with when things do go wrong. That is one count I couldn’t fault Toyota on. However, I have two years of warranty left on the Golf and I think I’ve got a fair deal from the dealership. Having said that, I rather like Motorpoint’s way of doing business – offering a no-haggle trade-in price up front. I may well go back to them when it comes to change our other car (hopefully not for a few years yet). I’ll post more thoughts on the Golf once I’ve had a few real-world ownership experiences of it although I checked back to my blog post in March when I described the Golf as the “car to buy when you don’t know what you really want." What does that say about me?