Why a low-mileage Tooting car is not automatically a good one
Tooting runs a lot of small hatchbacks and city cars suited to tight terraced streets, parked in controlled zones around the Broadway and the eight-hour bays near St George's Hospital. With 20mph limits across Wandsworth's residential streets and most of its other roads, many of those cars cover very few miles a year and spend days at a time standing still. The advert says one owner and 28,000 miles and it sounds ideal. Sometimes it is, and sometimes standing still is the problem.
Rubber and fluids age on a calendar, not an odometer. Tyres harden and crack in the sidewall, so we record the four-digit date code on every wheel as well as the tread depth. Brake fluid absorbs moisture over years, which we test rather than guess at, and coolant strength is measured the same way. Brake discs corrode at the edges and handbrake mechanisms stiffen on a car that is rarely used, and a battery that spends weeks without a proper charge rarely has much life left in it.
A car that only ever idles through Tooting Broadway traffic has other quirks. A diesel may never reach the exhaust temperatures its particulate filter needs, so we read soot loading and pressure values and look for a filter that has been replaced or interfered with. Short-trip petrol engines dilute their oil and coke up, so oil condition and the state of the air and pollen filters tell us how it has been looked after. Everything significant is photographed and written down.
To get it here, take Mitcham Road east through Mitcham and the Figges Marsh signals, round to the Cricket Green, then Cranmer Road and Carshalton Road south past Mitcham Junction, about 18 minutes. Agree it with the seller before you travel, hold the car with a refundable deposit if you can, and bring it cold. Two to three hours later you will have measured figures instead of an advert.