Car Checking
2 million brand new cars are sold in the UK each year, but approximately 4 times that number of second-hand cars change hands each year.
When buying a second-hand vehicle, it is essential that you check the vehicles history so that you can make sure it is exactly what is advertised.
A vehicle with outstanding finance on it is not yours until the last payment is made to the finance company, so you need to make sure that there is no outstanding finance on your new car or you may find it being repossessed and not only will you not have a car, you may not have any money to buy another one. Checks can be carried out to make sure that the car has not been stolen, if it were to have been stolen and the police find it that they will return it to the rightful owner, who is the person who it was stolen from and not the person who last bought it.
If the vehicle is involved in a serious accident, the insurance company may have declared it a write-off. It is possible to take two written off vehicles one with front-end damage and one with rear damage cut them in half and create one seemingly good vehicle. However, the vehicle will have lost a lot of its inherent strength.
For more on this see the PSR cut and shut section.