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Selling a Second-Hand Car: Selling Online
The chances are if you’re on the hunt for a new set of wheels that you already have one set sitting in your garage or on your driveway. You can, of course, trade the old vehicle in for the new one, but you tend to get a few more shekels if you sell it yourself – well, usually. This depends on the vehicle you’re selling and what your local car dealer can offer you in the way of a trade-in. But often, if you do your homework, you end up working out that you can probably get more by being your own used car salesman/woman/person.
Online auction sites like EBay (by far the most popular and international online sales site) are very popular for selling off your stuff. People go on that site for fun “just to have a wee look at what’s out there” and also when they’re seriously hunting for a car. And there are many upsides to doing so, as well as the odd downside.
One of the downsides is that you usually have to pay an insertion fee – after all, the operators of EBay have to eat. And even though listing some things on EBay can be done for free, cars can’t be, as you’ll find out if you read the small print. And you also have to pay a percentage of the final selling price. Make sure that you factor these costs in when you set the reserve price on the auction. At this point, you still want to be sure that you’re getting more cash in hand for your old wheels than you would get by using the vehicle as a trade in. Also consider this when setting your reserve price and your “buy now” price. The same applies to other online auction sites that allows private individuals to list stuff for sale.
To get a good idea of what your starting price and what your reserve price should be, have a look at other cars listed of the same age and type as the one you’re selling. Your price should be roughly around the same level, although you need to take mileage and overall condition into consideration.
Photos are an absolute must when you’re selling a vehicle online, but not all photos are alike. It can get a little ho-hum if the only photos you put up just show the exterior of the car from different angles. Yes, your car looks pretty good and you’ve done a nice job with the polish, but often buyers want to know more than just that – at least I would. If you’re looking for, say, a Honda Accord, and you see half a dozen listings that just show the front and side, and they’re all similar colours, they all start to look the same. So what sort of photos should you include?
- Side, front and rear views of the vehicle, and ensure that the licence plate is showing
- Shot of the dash and possibly a close-up of the odometer to prove that the mileage is really what you say it is.
- View of the boot plus things like the spare tyre.
- Shot of the engine bay – it doesn’t have to be steam cleaned!
- If the seats fold down, show them in folded and upright position
- A shot of any special features, e.g. alloy wheels
- A shot of any flaws that you’ve mentioned in your description so the viewers know exactly what they’re in for, e.g. that worn tyre or that little ding.
Be reasonably detailed when describing your vehicle and don’t just copy and paste the relevant page out of our car reviews (I’ve seen this done). Let your buyers know all the basic stats like the year, the engine size, the mileage, and all that sort of thing. If it’s got any special features or if you’ve recently replaced some parts, then list these as well (e.g. “brand new tyres on front”).
You may or may not want to list minor flaws. The key word here is “minor” – small things that you’d like to know if you were the buyer. You may also want to list the reason you’re selling it, but use discretion. “Owner going overseas,” “Expecting new addition to the family,” and “We’re downsizing and don’t need a second vehicle,” are all good reasons why you could be selling, but don’t explain that “It’s a thirsty brute and I’m not supporting its drinking habit any longer.”
There are a lot of cars for sale online so your vehicle may not sell the first time you list it. Often, the second attempt is more successful (but you might strike it lucky first time). Patience pays off… or you might like to try another method.
The World’s Worst Car?
The Book of Heroic Failures (a very popular and funny collection of spectacular failures and epic fails) quite naturally has an entry for the worst car ever. The (dis)honours in that book go to the Ford Edsel. And the Ford Edsel is certainly a bit of a dog. It was a gas-guzzler that came out just as a recession was hitting. The design of the front end was downright peculiar and the car itself wasn’t overly reliable. And then there was the name – naming a vehicle after the offspring of the company founder might have worked for Mercedes Benz (Mercedes was the name of Daimler’s daughter) but didn’t work when they tried naming this one after Edsel, son of Henry Ford Junior.
However, Ford Edsels are still knocking around and are considered classic collector’s items. After all, the cars were slightly notorious. However, they are still around to be collected. The same cannot be said for another contender for the title of Worst Car Ever, the Ford Pinto.
It is something of a tribute to all the other Ford cars that the company survived both of these spectacular failures. Having produced two such dogs (or lemons) would have ruined a lesser company.
But the Pinto! Regular readers of this blog will have noticed the Pinto turning up in the list of the (possibly) ugliest cars and the cars with the silliest names. The ugliness of the Pinto is, of course, debateable, and some people might like that rather interesting and slightly pointy back end. And an awful lot of people don’t. And the name is also unfortunate. My guess is that the designers of the Pinto were thinking of the horses, keeping this car in line with the Mustang. Horse-lovers, of course, know that “pinto” is the American name for a piebald or skewbald horse (black and white or brown and white for those who aren’t horsey) and they were really popular with Native Americans, so you’ve got a bit of a Wild West touch. However, because the name derives from the Spanish word for “paint” (because the horses look like they’ve had large blobs of white paint chucked at them), it’s also the name of a type of bean that also has a two-tone colour job. And it’s the Spanish for “pint”. In Portuguese, however, it means something different again – it’s the word for a willy, and I don’t mean the company that first came out with Jeeps.
But a bad name and debateable looks aren’t the utter kiss of death for a car. Ugliness is debateable and a car with a bad name can be perfectly reliable and efficient. But being dangerous is unforgiveable. And this is why the Ford Pinto really should have the title of Worst Car Ever. The Ford Edsel’s mechanical foibles pale by comparison beside what the Pinto could do.
It’s all in that sloping back end. You see, the design of the back end meant that if the Pinto was rear-ended – possibly one of the most common types of accident – the fuel tank would be shoved forwards and bits of it would break off, meaning that it was more likely to burst into flames in an accident. The sloping back end meant that the fuel tank didn’t have an awful lot of protection at the rear – not much of a bumper and absolutely no crumple zones. This is one reason why you don’t see too many Ford Pintos as collectors’ items: a lot of them exploded and ended up on the scrap heap.
The true ugliness of the Ford Pinto was revealed when a corporate document about this car was leaked to the public. You see, the heads of Ford at that time had become aware that this design flaw turned the Pinto into a death trap. And then they did a nasty piece of accounting where they weighed up the costs of recalling and repairing the vehicles versus the cost of paying compensation when drivers and passengers were burned alive – and found that compensation was cheaper so they decided to go with that (A copy of the original exposee is available here). A recall was forced on them eventually and the company was hauled into court with one heck of a lawsuit that the infamous cost–benefit analysis hadn’t quite factored in (full details on this website).
Ford survived and Ford has cleaned up its reputation since then. The Model T, the Anglia, the Mustang, the Thunderbird, the Escort and others remained popular. And Ford Europe and Ford Australia didn’t go near the Pinto. So Ford everywhere survived.
In many ways, the Ford Fiesta took the place of the Pinto shortly after a major lawsuit, becoming the compact economy model that had been the original aim behind the Pinto. Modern Fiestas got 5 stars out of 5 in the ANCAP safety tests.
What's In A Name?
As T.S. Eliot nearly said, the naming of cars is a difficult matter.* They say that having the wrong name for a car can make or break it, so the marketing team probably spend a fair amount of time picking the name for a new model. Or at least you would hope so.
We wonder why, therefore, General Motors have eschewed the Holden name in favour of Opel. That’s what they’ve done with the launch of the Opel brand in Australia this month, marketing four models.
Opel is a German brand owned by General Motors, so really it’s a Holden. In fact Holden have sold Opels before as Holdens. They’ve also re-branded Chevrolets, Vauxhall, Isuzu and Daewoo as Holdens for the home market.
Is it because they think that the ‘German’ name is synonymous with quality, and they can therefore get a premium price? Mmm, perhaps, and their Oz slogan ‘Wir lieben Autos” (we love cars) suggests that’s the case (to say nothing of the German accent in the TV ads!). But then the Astra is made in China, Poland and the UK as well as Germany, so there’s no guarantee ‘our’ Opel is made in Germany. I wonder if GM, Holden or Opel would care to comment?
The intoduction of the Opel name to the Australian motorist makes me wonder how the marketing guys come up with some of these names.
Some car marques, especially the European ones, make things easy on the marketing team and simply stick to a series of numbers and letters. BMW and Mercedes are particularly good at this, and once you’ve figured out how the code works, you know exactly what’s what with the car. For example, in the BMW 320D, the 3 indicates the series (3-series) while the other numbers indicate the engine size. The D on the end means that it runs on diesel. And if you have an M and just one number such as M3, you know, as Edward Cullen informs Bella Swann in the first Twilight book, that it’s a fast, luxurious and powerful car (incidentally, the Twilight books – not sure about the movies – devote a fair amount of time to cars for a soppy romance story aimed at teenage girls. A new target market, maybe?). Other manufacturers who have cottoned onto the numbers and letters idea include Volvo, Audi, Jaguar and (a departure from Europe) Lexus. Mazda has also recently got on board the letters and numbers bandwagon, probably after some of the clangers mentioned below.
And that’s all very well and it does avoid problems and embarrassment by giving your brand new car a name that sounds silly or can’t be pronounced. However, for a lot of people, buying a car is an emotional decision and there’s nothing like a name or a word to stimulate the imagination. And actual names have another advantage for marketers: they’re easy to remember and get into the public’s heads via ads.
Successful car names that actually mean something tend to fall into several major categories. The first, popular with sports cars, is the “fast, dangerous animals” category. The winner here is Jaguar, which has an entire marque named after a big cat. Other worthy contenders include the Ford Falcon, Hyundai Tiburon (Shark in Spanish) and the Porsche Cayman (a caiman is a crocodile sort of thing). Or they have adventurous sorts of names like the VW Touareg (named after the desert nomads), Nissan Safari and Land Rover Discovery. Or they go for something that sounds upmarket (Holden Statesman) or like something to aspire to (Mitsubishi Aspire). Or they try to make you smile, like the Honda Jazz or the Fiat Panda.
Often, however, the people dreaming up the names tend to come up with things that sound a bit like real words or real words put together. Examples of this sort include Toyota’s Presara and Hiace. I’m not sure how they come up with these things. Apparently the marketing folk come up with screeds of suggestions that get slowly whittled down by the Powers That Be to a final solution. I sometimes wonder if they write down a list of suitable and appropriate words while sober, then get drunk and attempt to re-write the list with one person reading them out and the other person writing them down.
And the process does seem to come up with some odd results. We’ve probably all heard the story about the poor old Mitsubishi Pajero and how it’s supposed to mean “wanker” in Spanish. This didn’t stop it selling reasonably well in Spanish-speaking Bolivia, which is where this writer was living when the Pajero came out. After all, a good car is still a good car in spite of the name – the HSV is still popular, probably even with doctors, even though these initials being standard medical speak for the Herpes Simplex Virus. But the theory about the naming team getting drunk seems to be the only explanation for things like the Suzuki Kizashi, the Nissan Qashqai (that’s its overseas name – but is “Dualis” really that much better, sounding very close to Cialis?), Hyundai Getz, Ssangyong Kyron and the Toyota Yaris. Either that or someone was trying to get rid of high-scoring Scrabble letters.
The oddest car names are, like the ugliest cars, a matter for debate. And some really peculiar ones never make it out of Asia (e.g. the Honda Life Dunk or the Mitsubishi Mini Active Urban Sandal). But the following certainly deserve some (dis)honourable mention in this category (incidentally, I have owned at least two of the cars on this list at some stage):
- AMC Gremlin
- Mazda Bongo Friendee
- Mazda Marvie Proceed
- Isuzu Mysterious Utility Wizard (and MU isn’t much better than Mysterious Utility)
- Dodge Swinger
- Toyota Cressida (Cressida being a Shakespeare gal known for being unreliable and faithless)
- Isuzu Giga 20 Light Dump
- Daihatsu Naked
- Ford Pinto (a bean, a horse, Spanish for pint or “I paint” or Portugese for penis).
- Nissan Homy (yes, that is an M for Mike, not an R and an N close together)
More exist. Send us your suggestions, along with your ugly cars!
- Daihatsu Naked – We all know sex sells, but this is ridiculous.
*What the poet actually said was “the naming of cats is a difficult matter”.
Ugly is in the eye of the beholder
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So is ugliness. Some cars rated as being horribly hideous by one reviewer might have a certain quirkiness that endears the vehicle to other people. So it’s always a little bit iffy when people come up with the lists of the ugliest cars.
The following were ranked as being the ugliest cars of 2012 by Forbes magazine and website. In other words, if your favourite set of wheels is in this list, or if you actually quite like the looks of a particular vehicle, don’t blame me. A few of these had me scratching my head and wondering what on earth these guys were on about. Some I did agree with, of course. But the practical side of me says that there’s more to a car than the way it looks, and if it gets you from A to B comfortably and efficiently, then looks can be irrelevant. And is it really a big deal that you have a car so hideous that it stands out from all the rest of the computer-designed blandness?
So here’s the list of the ugliest cars of 2012, as Forbes magazine and website calls it.
• Acura ZDX: we don’t have this one over here, so don’t go looking for it in our car reviews page
• Ford Transit Connect (actually, it looks better than some fridge-on-wheels vans I’ve seen)
• GMC Terrain: another one that we don’t have here, so you’ll be spared the variation on squareness the designers played with
• Honda Crosstour (are these reviewers nuts?)
• Lexus CT 200h hybrid (see above – who’s paying them?)
• Lincoln MKT (again, one we don’t have over in Australia)
• Mercedes Benz R-Class: OK, so it looks like a hearse… which is a good thing if you actually are an undertaker. But is it really that ugly?
• Mini Coupe: well, it certainly isn’t the classic Mini as we know it.
• Mitsubishi i MieV: yes, this one does look a bit weird. The overall silhouette isn’t bad, so maybe the designers will be able to improve on it as the years go by.
• Nissan Murano Crosscabriolet: not that ugly in my books, as you can expect an interesting crossover vehicle to look different
• Porsche Panamera: hey, I think this one looks quite nice!
• Smart Pure Coupe: Another oddball one, but that’s expected with Smart.
• Toyota Prius V: I now have a very low opinion of the reviewers of the Forbes magazine.
OK, that was one list. And it was rather limited in that it only considered cars that came out this year (and 2012 isn’t even over yet, so who knows what’s coming?). Other lists, such as the one put out by the Discovery channel, have older and uglier ones, many of which were unsafe into the bargain… now that’s ugly.
The list was:
10 Ford Edsel
9 Studebaker Avanti (yes, that’s the front of the car)
8 Chevrolet Corvair
7 Fiat Yugo
6 Ford Pinto (and an absolute deathtrap into the bargain)
5 Chevrolet Vega
4 AMC Gremlin
3 Fiat Multipla
2 Pontiac Aztek
1 AMC Pacer.
It would be fun to develop a list of the ugliest cars in Australia. Personally, that Fiat Multipla ought to be in there. Any other suggestions?
Level 2, 9 Help Street
