How to read an expo stand without being read yourself

Watch where you are guided. Display cars are nearly always angled so you approach the front three-quarter view, the one that flatters the nose and hides how much the roofline drops at the rear. The driver's door is open and the passenger door is often shut, because an open driver's door invites you into the good position. The boot is closed on the cars with a shallow boot and open on the cars with a deep one, and once you have noticed that pattern at two shows you cannot stop noticing it.

Lighting does the rest. Cool white light makes a dark grey cabin look grey and tired, so stands use warm light, which also warms the plastics and the stitching. If you want a sober look at interior colour, open both rear doors and look at the cabin in the light that comes in from the hall rather than from above.

Everybody climbs behind the wheel first, which is exactly backwards if you are buying a car that will carry your sister-in-law to a wedding in Paarl. Set the driver's seat where you would actually have it, height included, get out, and then get into the seat behind it. Your knees will tell you the truth in two seconds. Do the same on the left side, because many cabins are asymmetric once the centre console and the transmission tunnel are in place.

Then check the middle of the rear bench, and be ruthless. A car described as a five-seater often has a rear middle seat that is raised, narrow and sitting over a hump, which makes it a short-journey place for a child and nothing more. We have stopped using the word five-seater on this site for that reason. We say four adults and a child, or three adults, and we say which.

Quoted luggage volume is measured to the roof in some markets and to the parcel shelf in others, and the difference between four hundred and sixty litres and six hundred litres can be nothing more than measuring convention. So carry a reference object. Ours is a hard cabin case, fifty-five by forty by twenty-three centimetres, and we try two of them side by side in every boot we care about.

Shape beats volume on a long run anyway. A tall narrow boot with a high lip is worse than a shallow wide one if you are lifting a cooler box in and out at a farm stall near Riviersonderend, and a spare wheel well that holds a full-size spare matters a great deal on gravel, where a space-saver will not get you the eighty kilometres to the next town at anything like a sensible speed. Ask whether the spare is full-size. Half the time the person on the stand will have to check.

Avoid questions that invite a brochure line. Instead of asking whether the car is comfortable, ask what the service interval is in kilometres and in months, and what a major service costs once the plan has run out. Instead of asking about reliability, ask where the nearest approved workshop is to Oudtshoorn, and whether a common wear part, say a front suspension bush, is held locally or ordered in.

Two more we use every time. What does the insurer require on this model, in terms of a tracker or an immobiliser, because on some cars that adds two hundred to four hundred rand a month to a premium. And what does the warranty say about gravel roads and about towing, since a fair number of Cape owners will do both within a month of buying.

Use one page per car, the same eight lines each time, and write the car's description at the top in your own words rather than the model name, because by Tuesday evening three of the names will have blurred together. Our lines are: ingress, rear knee room behind your own driving position, two cases in the boot or not, spare wheel type, service interval, aircon vents in the rear, visibility over the left shoulder, and the price range quoted on the day.

Photograph the spec board on the stand, and photograph the boot with your case in it. A photograph with your own luggage in the frame is worth more than any amount of remembered impression, and it settles arguments at home.