BloggEd

A common myth is that Finnish people are honest.

Before you grab that bag of rotten tomatoes and start looking for my home address, I’d like you to ponder the following concept for a split second:

An honest, second-hand car salesman

Note that private individuals selling their own vehicles are included. Sure, if you demand such a thing exists, I believe you can find at least one among 1000 other people in similar position (maybe some of you included people selling their real estate to the same category). But I’ll resort to generalizations here, as mos^h^h^h all people do .

It seems like our primary means for personal transportation just surpassed its expiration date. Upon compulsory inspection it came out that the degree of corrosion in the chassis is so high, that a new car would be a much better investment instead of fixing the old one. When we bought the car, say, three years ago or so it was in such a perfect condition that it didn’t have any issues at all, even less any fixes to tend to (of course I didn’t believe it, yet I was stupid enough to buy it).

Now, while looking for a new, decent card (well, not brand new but new to us) it seems like only few people selling his old vehicle are willing to take part in condition analysis expenses - quite a standard procedure when buying a second-hand car, even though the price to pay is less than 1% of the money requested for the car.

My stubborn, ad-hoc conclusion I’m currently determined to stick with: If the person selling the car is not willing to have the car examined, I cannot but believe that he is asking much more than what is worth for the car. And even if the buyer wouldn’t like to buy the car after the inspection, an honest dealer would still gain by having an authorized, signed document from an impartial, third-party member.

Of course, the matter is completely different with cars worth 200-300 EUR, where paying the inspection price would be a) more than 25% of the total price b) complete waste of time anyways. But for more expensive cars, at least in the price range of 2000 and above, I wouldn’t recommend any other way.

BOCTAOE.