Cars

I’m currently in Cornwall with my family and whenever I spend a lot of time with my children I’m constantly reminded of the opening lines of ‘This Be the Verse’: ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do. / They fill you with the faults they had / And add some extra, just for you.’ One of the faults my late father passed on to me was an obsession with sports cars. As he cruised along the motorway in his Austin Maxi at a steady 70mph he would point out every fast car that passed us, usually accompanied by a barrage of facts: ‘Ooh look. That’s a Lotus Esprit. I think that’s an S1 — yes, it’s an S1. It has the same four-cylinder engine that was used in the Jensen Healey.

This is the story of the amazing, disappearing car warranty. It is a cautionary tale that all second-hand car buyers should heed. And it goes like this. The amazing, disappearing car warranty began life as an apparently normal car warranty issued to a Volvo XC90 I bought for a very reasonable price after the builder boyfriend helped me negotiate by deploying his best south London geezer tradesman banter. What clinched the deal was the salesman telling the builder he was so sure we would be happy with the car, he would issue his ‘wife’ with a one-year Gold warranty. ‘She’s not my wife — thank god! Ha ha!’ bantered the builder, sparking much hilarity, ‘but that’s a great offer. We’ll take it.

The sometime builder boyfriend spotted the Volvo on his way to a roofing job in Dorking. He rang me greatly excited. It had a few bumps and scratches but the pertinent facts were these: one owner. Never towed. A bike rack on the back. Haribo wrappers all over the seats. Oh, and the mark from an auction sticker still visible in the windscreen. ‘So it’s a mess,’ I said. ‘No,’ said the builder, who used to be a car dealer. ‘It’s a genuine family car that you can probably get cheap because it’s a bit dinged up. Trust me.’ The thing is, despite everything, all our stops and starts and offs and ons, I do trust him. But when I turned up to see the car, he wasn’t there so I sat in the car park waiting.