Hail, flood and the cars that come back from the dead

A Pretoria hailstorm in late summer can mark every horizontal panel on a street of parked cars in four minutes. Insurers write some of them off, repairers buy them, and the dents come out with paintless dent removal that is genuinely good work when it is done well. The problem is the cars where it was done cheaply, with filler and a blow-over of paint on the roof and bonnet.

To see hail, get the panel between you and a light source. Crouch at the front bumper and look down the bonnet towards a window or a streetlight, and the dimples appear as a rash of soft shadows. Do the same across the roof from the door opening. Run a finger over the roof rails and the top of the windscreen surround, because those are the places repairers skip. A gentle repaired car is not a reason to walk; a repainted roof with overspray on the rubbers is.

Flooded cars from the coast reach Gauteng dealers regularly, because a car with a clean body and a ruined wiring harness looks like a bargain on a trailer. Water that has been above the carpet line destroys connectors slowly, from the inside, and the faults arrive months later: a window that stops, an airbag warning that will not clear, a fuel pump relay that sticks on a hot afternoon.

Look where water settles and nobody cleans. Under the spare wheel, inside the seatbelt reel housings, in the seat rails and the channels under the rear seat, behind the kick panels, inside the boot lamp. You are hunting for silt, a tidemark, rust on the heads of bolts that should never rust, and a shiny new carpet in a car with worn pedals. Pull the spare wheel out and smell the well; a river has a particular smell that air freshener does not cover.

Our registration system records whether a car is new, used or built up, and a car that has been written off and rebuilt carries that status on its papers. It is not illegal to sell one and some are repaired properly, but the resale value is permanently lower, several insurers will only cover it on limited terms, and a few will decline it. If the status is on the papers and the price does not reflect it, the price is wrong.

Check the papers yourself rather than relying on a description in an advert. Compare the vehicle identification number on the certificate with the one on the dashboard plate, the one on the firewall and the one on the door sticker. Where a sticker is missing, a plate has been riveted rather than bonded, or a number has been restamped, you are looking at a car with a history somebody chose not to write down.

Insurance salvage goes to auction, and auctions are where repairers, exporters and the occasional optimistic member of the public buy. From there a repaired car may be sold honestly as a rebuild, or it may be moved through two or three private owners in different provinces until the trail is thin and the advert simply says one owner, full service history, must be seen.

Be alert to the pattern rather than the place. A car registered in one province, licensed in a second, now being sold in Pretoria by someone who says it belongs to an uncle, with papers that have not yet come back from somewhere, is a pattern. Honest sellers of rebuilt cars tell you upfront and price accordingly, and we have no problem with them at all.

There is a sensible version of this. A car with documented hail damage, never repaired, priced well below a clean one, is a reasonable purchase for a driver who parks under cover and does not care about dimples. The mechanicals are untouched, the interior is dry, and the discount is real. Several readers in Pretoria East drive exactly such cars and are quietly pleased with themselves.

Flood cars are different, and here we are blunt: do not buy one at any price. Corrosion inside a wiring harness cannot be inspected and cannot be priced, the faults are intermittent by nature, and the workshop bills arrive one connector at a time for the rest of the car's life. A dimpled roof is cosmetic. A drowned loom is a slow leak in your bank account.