Field notes from the lot

These are impressions from our own lot, written down as they occurred to us. They are not measurements and we have not counted anything — where a note sounds like a statistic, read it as a habit we think we have noticed rather than a finding. Nothing below describes a specific customer.

1. Almost everyone opens the driver's door first and the trunk second. Hardly anyone opens the rear doors unless they have children, which means the rear seat is the least-inspected part of most cars and the place where wear shows most honestly.

2. The cleanest engine bay on any lot is usually the one that was pressure washed. A washed bay looks reassuring and conceals seeps for a couple of weeks, until the residue builds back up. A slightly dusty engine bay with no wet patches tells you more than a spotless one.

3. People apologize for asking to see the inspection sheet. There is a particular half-embarrassed phrasing — sorry, would it be possible to — that comes up often enough to be a pattern. It is the least apology-worthy request anyone makes here.

4. A car listed for five days and a car listed for fifty look identical in photographs. Days-on-lot is the single most useful fact about a listing and it is almost never published. You can sometimes get it by asking when the photos were taken.

5. Left to themselves, buyers pick a test drive route that is too short and too smooth — usually a loop of the nearest through road. The cars that reveal themselves do it on broken pavement, at parking-lot speed, and at highway speed with the radio off.

6. Nobody checks the spare. Occasionally somebody will ask whether there is one, which is a different question, and a good one, because plenty of cars now have an inflator kit and a sealed compartment instead.

7. The reconditioning item that surprises people most is tires that still have tread. A tire with plenty of depth and a date code from several years back is aged rubber, and it is replaced here whether or not anyone would have noticed.

8. Rain changes the day's shape. Fewer people walk on, more people call, and the calls are longer and more specific. We do more useful work on a wet Tuesday than a bright one.

9. The windshield price is read from about fifteen feet away, and the reaction to it happens before anyone reaches the car. That is the entire argument for posting it. A price read at a distance sorts people gently; a price withheld makes everyone walk the whole lot twice.

10. "What's your best price?" arrives before the test drive far more often than after it. Asked that early it is not really a question about price — it is a question about whether the number on the glass is real.

11. The second key comes up about three weeks after delivery, almost never before. Programming a replacement is real money on a modern car, which makes it a thing to settle while the deal is still open rather than a small annoyance later.

12. Every car has one angle that flatters it and one that does not. A three-quarter front on a low sun makes anything look expensive. We photograph both angles, which is why our listings sometimes look less glossy than the ones next to them.

13. The trade-in number people arrive expecting is usually an online estimate for a car in better condition than the one in the driveway. The gap is rarely about the model or the mileage. It is about tires, brakes, a windshield chip, and the interior.

14. Three seconds inside a car with the door closed tells you more than twenty interior photographs. Smoke, mildew, coolant, a working air freshener covering something. It is the one inspection nobody can do online, and it is free.

15. Our impression — unmeasured, so treat it as impression — is that a car with a folder of receipts moves faster than an identical car with lower miles and no history. We cannot prove it. We buy as if it's true.

16. The Buyers Guide in the window is the one document that is legally required to be displayed, and it is the one document almost nobody reads. It states whether the car is sold with a warranty or as-is, which is the single most consequential sentence in the transaction.

17. Six cars is a constraint, and it changes what we buy. There is no room to take a flyer on something interesting that might sit for ninety days, because a sixth of the lot cannot be a hobby. It makes us more conservative than we would be with thirty spaces.

18. Winter Saturdays are dead until about eleven. Summer Saturdays start at nine. The same is not true of phone calls, which begin at eight-thirty all year round.

19. People test the radio. Very few people test the rear defroster, the rear wiper, the cargo light, or the passenger window from the passenger switch — which is where the failures are.

20. Bad photographs of a good car cost more than good photographs of a bad car ever earn. A buyer who arrives disappointed by the pictures is easy to please. One who arrives expecting the pictures is not.

21. The question that tells us someone has done this before: "can I take it to my own mechanic?" — asked on the phone, not standing on the lot. Asked early it is procedural. Asked at the end of a long afternoon it is awkward for everyone, and it gets asked less often as a result.

22. The paperwork always takes longer than people expect and finishes sooner than they feared. The part that takes the time is not the signing. It is reading, which is the part worth taking time over.

Written from our own experience on a six-car lot in New Jersey. Nothing above is measured data, a survey, or a description of any identifiable customer or vehicle. Requirements for vehicle disclosure documents are set by regulators rather than by us — confirm what applies to any specific purchase.