From the show floor to a signed offer, three weeks later

Go home with two cars and no deposit. The stand will often have a show offer attached to a signature on the day, and some of those offers are real, but a discount of fifteen or twenty thousand rand on a purchase you will live with for six years is not a reason to skip the part where you drive the car on your own roads. If the offer is genuine it will usually still be available on the Monday, and if it is not, you have learned something about the seller.

Write the shortlist down in your own language. Not the model names, which you will mix up, but the descriptions: the mid-size crossover with the full-size spare and the good rear doors, and the full-size German saloon with the shallow boot. We have watched people argue for ten minutes about which car they meant.

Week one is homework. Get the service interval and the plan length in writing, get a quote for insurance including whatever tracker the insurer wants, and phone an independent workshop in your area to ask what the common faults are at a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres. That last call takes four minutes and is the single most useful thing in the whole process.

Week two is driving. One hour minimum per car, on your roads, including a pass if you can and a gravel entrance if that is part of your life. Week three is paperwork and negotiation, and by then you will know which of the two cars you keep thinking about when you are not trying to. That is usually the answer, although it is worth checking that the reason is not simply that the cabin smelled nice.

Ask for the interval in both kilometres and months, because a car on a fifteen-thousand-kilometre interval and a twelve-month limit is a different proposition for someone who drives six thousand kilometres a year. Then ask what a service costs outside the plan: a minor at somewhere between two thousand five hundred and four thousand five hundred rand is normal for a mainstream car, and a major on a large luxury saloon can run past twelve thousand once you include brake fluid and filters.

Parts availability is the thing that bites people who retire to a small town. A model sold in large numbers has a bush, a bulb and a wheel bearing available in George or Mossel Bay the same week; a low-volume import may have a three-week wait and a courier charge from Gauteng. If your week includes a seventy-kilometre drive to the nearest town with a parts counter, weight this heavily. A low-volume import you can afford to buy may still be one you cannot afford to run.

A two-year-old example of a better car usually beats a new example of a lesser one, provided the history is complete and the car has not spent its life on gravel. Get the service book stamped and the invoices if possible, and have an independent inspection done before you talk about price. An inspection costs roughly one thousand two hundred to two thousand rand and has saved people we know rather more than that.

Then the admin, which is dull and unavoidable. The car needs a valid roadworthy certificate for the change of ownership, the licence disc has to be renewed annually and the renewal notice goes to the registered address, so update it or you will miss it. Keep the licence renewal receipt in the car, allow for the registration and licensing fees on top of the purchase price, and if you are buying privately, do the transfer at the licensing office with the seller present rather than trusting a promise to send the forms.

The hardest part is walking away from a car you like for a reason you cannot photograph. The rear door that opens to sixty degrees, the boot lip that is too high for your shoulder, the glass roof that will make the cabin unbearable in Worcester in January. Those are real reasons and they outlast the pleasure of the paint colour.

Our view, after a lot of halls: most people over fifty-five end up happier with the duller, roomier car, and most of them resist that conclusion for about two months. If you are torn between the handsome one and the comfortable one, and your life contains a four-hundred-kilometre drive twice a year with a passenger who has a bad back, the comfortable one is the right answer and you already know it.