Recap: We’d sold the car on the Thursday and needed to source a new(er) one, but with the slight impediment that we now didn’t have a car to use to go looking for a car*.
The first task was to put together a shortlist. Too many hours spent staring at laptop screens, scrolling-scrolling-scrolling and making notes. There were moments of amusement, like the Mercedes Vito that looked good until I reviewed the MoT history and found that it had an MoT in 2014 at 35k miles and then another in 2019 at 117k miles, with a big gap in between. Conversely there was another that had been owned by ITV and had been MoT’d every 6 months without fail (presumably a condition of insurance when carting around famous people?).
By the end of the Friday we’d conceded that to buy a Vito whose history we trusted, it would be a white van, probably a 1.6-litre engine and with between 75k and 100k miles on the clock (on the plus side, we could have got one that was only 4 years old). I would have gone for a white van (and then retrofitted some rear windows) if the vehicle met all of our other ideals, but in the dozens of potential vehicles we noted, not a single one of them did.
There were many pages of notes like this
Back to the Peugeot Expert Tepee, then! This is a vehicle generally used for one of two purposes: 1) a 5-7 seat taxi; or 2) modification into a Wheelchair Accessible Vehicle (WAV), often as part of the Motability scheme. The main difference (ignoring the WAV mods) is that the latter are commonly 1-owner, low mileage vehicles that have been serviced religiously every year, whereas the former generally have scarily high mileages and hard lives. Our focus was decidedly on the WAVs.
Then I found something almost as rare as hens’ teeth: a high-spec, very low mileage, unmodified Expert Tepee. The downsides were that it was being sold at auction (not currently open to the public, due to Coronavirus) and its previous owner was the Ministry of Defence, so we would buy it unregistered (and I’m sure I said after importing Bertie that I wouldn’t choose to go through the registration process again). It also wouldn’t have an MoT, causing me to fall down a rabbit hole of reading legislation to find out if we could legally drive it to an MoT station before it was registered (bearing in mind that it couldn’t be registered until it had an MoT) and talking to insurers about insuring an unregistered vehicle against its VIN. It was the ideal vehicle, but was it just too much uncertainty and hassle?
We slept on it over the weekend.
To be continued…
(* We could, of course, have put Bertie back on the road, but being just past the middle of the month, I held off buying the road tax until we really needed to go somewhere. It was an inconvenience that we sold the car just as the fridge was nearing empty, but the following week I managed to secure a grocery delivery only a couple of days after it reached the point of complete bareness (with the freezer not far behind). I thought I’d ordered plenty, but I hadn’t factored in how hungry I would be whilst running the Virtual Lakeland 50. I then couldn’t get another delivery slot and there was no way we were paying for a month’s road tax for Bertie at that point, just for the few days left in the month. By the time I finally went shopping on 1 August cupboards, fridge and freezer had reached an all-time record state of emptiness.)
The first task was to put together a shortlist. Too many hours spent staring at laptop screens, scrolling-scrolling-scrolling and making notes. There were moments of amusement, like the Mercedes Vito that looked good until I reviewed the MoT history and found that it had an MoT in 2014 at 35k miles and then another in 2019 at 117k miles, with a big gap in between. Conversely there was another that had been owned by ITV and had been MoT’d every 6 months without fail (presumably a condition of insurance when carting around famous people?).
By the end of the Friday we’d conceded that to buy a Vito whose history we trusted, it would be a white van, probably a 1.6-litre engine and with between 75k and 100k miles on the clock (on the plus side, we could have got one that was only 4 years old). I would have gone for a white van (and then retrofitted some rear windows) if the vehicle met all of our other ideals, but in the dozens of potential vehicles we noted, not a single one of them did.
Back to the Peugeot Expert Tepee, then! This is a vehicle generally used for one of two purposes: 1) a 5-7 seat taxi; or 2) modification into a Wheelchair Accessible Vehicle (WAV), often as part of the Motability scheme. The main difference (ignoring the WAV mods) is that the latter are commonly 1-owner, low mileage vehicles that have been serviced religiously every year, whereas the former generally have scarily high mileages and hard lives. Our focus was decidedly on the WAVs.
Then I found something almost as rare as hens’ teeth: a high-spec, very low mileage, unmodified Expert Tepee. The downsides were that it was being sold at auction (not currently open to the public, due to Coronavirus) and its previous owner was the Ministry of Defence, so we would buy it unregistered (and I’m sure I said after importing Bertie that I wouldn’t choose to go through the registration process again). It also wouldn’t have an MoT, causing me to fall down a rabbit hole of reading legislation to find out if we could legally drive it to an MoT station before it was registered (bearing in mind that it couldn’t be registered until it had an MoT) and talking to insurers about insuring an unregistered vehicle against its VIN. It was the ideal vehicle, but was it just too much uncertainty and hassle?
We slept on it over the weekend.
To be continued…
(* We could, of course, have put Bertie back on the road, but being just past the middle of the month, I held off buying the road tax until we really needed to go somewhere. It was an inconvenience that we sold the car just as the fridge was nearing empty, but the following week I managed to secure a grocery delivery only a couple of days after it reached the point of complete bareness (with the freezer not far behind). I thought I’d ordered plenty, but I hadn’t factored in how hungry I would be whilst running the Virtual Lakeland 50. I then couldn’t get another delivery slot and there was no way we were paying for a month’s road tax for Bertie at that point, just for the few days left in the month. By the time I finally went shopping on 1 August cupboards, fridge and freezer had reached an all-time record state of emptiness.)
If that's your short-list my mind boggles at the thought of the long one. But it must cry out to be computerised with an algorithm which could inform you of the most appropriate choice, which in deluded Yellow Thatch style you could then choose to ignore.
ReplyDeleteWe didn't get as far as a short list for the Vito. Having made notes like these (Mick had his own set in a different notebook as he was scouring Autotrader at the same time that I was interrogating Ebay) on pretty well every Vito we found listed for sale that met a couple of loose criteria, we concluded that there wasn't a single one currently available that met enough of our requirements to warrant being put on a short list. Our attention then turned back to Peugeot Expert Tepees, where it turned out that the short list was very short, as there were so few of them for sale at sensible prices (no doubt due to the impact the lockdown restrictions had on the supply chain).
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