selling my car

this is a somewhat boring post, but I thought I'd better do it for a record, plus it might be useful to somebody. I never sold a car before, and was intimidated by the idea. But I had to, I thought black just won't work on Fuerteventura, it'll be like a furnace.



An aside - now I see some black cars around, and I although I don't know if air conditioning manages to cool them down, my main concern, I can see that none of them look clean - fine dust seems to settle on them almost immediately. Light color is a necessity

Needless to say, I procrastinated. As an excuse, if I really need one, I can say that I really did need the car till the last moment. I made some preliminary research and found this website - http://www.wewillbuyyourcar.com . Searching for independent reviews shown that they tend to give a fair market value, not the best perhaps, but I was more concerned with hassle-free process than with getting max value. Another restriction (didn't apply in my case) - car needs to be less than ten years old and have less than 80 000 of mileage.

So. On Friday, exactly one week before we flew out, I went to their website and filled in all the forms to get a quote. As I am not mechanically minded person ("it's big and black and it goes" is my idea of good description), I stopped at a local garage and asked them to look at my tyres beforehand (two were close to legal limit, but not there yet). I listed all problems that I know with the car, got my quote (which was more or less what I expected), accepted the offer online, and somebody called within two hours. He went through my description with me ("what sort of scratch?" - "overoptimistic parking close to a column" - "ah") and we agreed that their driver will come next wednesday (they wanted to come on tuesday, but wednesday was not a problem).

The driver came and went through the car very thoroughly. It seems that I listed everything apart from the fact that a stone chip in the windscreen started a small crack and the whole thing needed replacement. The same person I spoke to called again to re-negotiate the price. The difference seemed fair to me (it is an expensive piece of glass), so I accepted the new price. He said to expect a bank transfer within 20 mins, and that's what happened. Driver was there waiting for the transfer to be completed and took the car away only when I saw the money in my account. The only problem with the whole process, if you can call it that, was non-arrival of confirmation email from their bank, but since I could access my account online, that wasn't so much of an issue. And that's pretty much it :)
Photos with the same model at shutterstock - here