With a preference for a smallish 4x4 and a budget of £3000 it's not been easy and I've seen a lot of cosmetically tidy but very high mileage cars with some serious rust problems underneath.
Eventually yesterday, I found a local dealer (a one-man business) who's entire stock is 4x4's between 9 and 15 years old. Among them, advertised on-line was a low mileage Suzuki with a pretty good MOT history but a few hundred quid over budget. I went to see the car and found that the price on the windscreen was £500 more than the on-line price. All the other car prices shown corresponded with the on-line prices. When I queried the price difference, he immediately dropped the price saying that the higher price was correct but as he'd made an error with the on-line advert he'd sell at the lower price.
A test-drive revealed that the newly-fitted rear silencer was mis-aligned causing an annoying rattle. He flatly refused to let me take the car until it had been re-fitted correctly.
Then he volunteered to take my Astra as a p/ex and offered me a higher price for it than I'd been asking when I tried (and failed) to sell it privately a few months ago. He hardly looked at the car; didn't even run the engine; just checked it's HPI status.
In the finish, my purchase, including a year's warranty (extended at my expense to two years) has come in under budget. Pretty chuffed so far
