Picking Up the Car

After two days of deliberation I decided that I would buy that 1999 Peugeot Expert. Offered a lower price, because of all the various faults that the seller had described and that I had seen. We agreed on a purchase price of £ 1,900.

It was a rainy evening. I took the train, partially going on an old historic train route, which was very exciting. The seller's house was within walking distance from the train station, which was very convenient. The formalities of the sale were quickly dealt with, and then I went out into the rainy evening, where the car was parked on the road. The seller told me that they had named the car "Percy", because it is a Peugeot.

A first surprise was that the doors were unlocked. I had been told that the sliding side doors could not be locked, but now I realised that also both front doors could not be locked from the outside with the key - the key just rotated in the locks without moving any mechanism. I should have checked this when I did the inspection of the car. Well, I would fix that sometime soon. The car started well, and I drove off, onto the motorway. On the way I stopped at a service station, to fill up. It was then that I realised that the LCD-display of the mileage was dark. I could only read it (with great difficulty) when shining a flashlight onto it. So apparently the counter was still working, but the backlight illumination of that display was broken - another thing that I should have noticed earlier. It slowly dawned on me that I probably would need to revise my vehicle inspection strategy significantly. The seller had told me that the heating would not work. In fact, the heating did work, but what was not working was the ventilator. Which is much more crucial, as the front windscreen began to fog in that wet rainy weather. So I opened the side window to let fresh air in. The glove compartment did not close anymore, it just stayed open.

The picture above is the first picture that I took of the car; it was still in front of the seller's house. I arrived well at home and parked the car, pretending I would lock the doors. But in order to get into the car later, I had to leave one door unlocked... I did lock three of the doors from the inside, and that one last door (the driver-side sliding door) I left unlocked, so that I could open it and then access the driver side door from the inside. Not exactly a very safe thing to do in the crime-ridden neighbourhood where I was living... But I had no choice.