Spares, waiting times and what the car costs after the sale

Phone two independent spares shops in Pretoria West and ask what a front wheel bearing, a set of front brake pads and discs, a water pump and an alternator cost for the car you are considering. It takes fifteen minutes and it reorders shortlists. Two cars of the same size and age can differ by a factor of three on exactly those four items, and you will buy all four eventually.

Then ask the harder question: is it in stock, and if not, how long? For high-volume family cars the answer is usually this afternoon. For a low-volume European car with a big engine the answer may be a week from an importer, and for something genuinely rare, longer, with the car standing in a workshop bay the whole time. A courtesy car is not part of the deal when the fault is yours.

Gauteng hides this problem. Drive four hours in any direction and the picture changes: in Lephalale, Groblersdal, Vryburg or Colesberg, a workshop can fix almost anything mechanical on a common car and almost nothing on an uncommon one. Diagnostic equipment for premium European models is a metro thing. If your retirement plan involves a smallholding outside Bela-Bela, that fact belongs in your shortlist now, not later.

This is the main reason so many drivers over fifty in this country end up in a mid-size Japanese or Korean car or a double-cab bakkie, and it is not a failure of ambition. It is the correct answer to a real constraint. The nearest dealer for the car you fancy might be in Polokwane, and a tow from the N1 at Mokopane to Pretoria runs from R4 500 upwards indicative.

Large-diameter wheels with low sidewalls look good in a showroom and cost money for the rest of the car's life. A common sixteen or seventeen inch size in a decent mid-range brand sits around R1 500 to R2 600 a corner indicative. Go up to a twenty inch low-profile size and you are looking at R4 500 to R9 000 a corner, often on order, and the sidewall that protects your rim from a Pretoria pothole is barely there.

Brakes follow the same logic. Pads and discs on a family car come to roughly R4 500 to R8 000 a pair of axles fitted; on a heavy premium car with big discs it is comfortably double. Ask for the part numbers and check them yourself. A car that needs tyres and brakes in the same month is a R30 000 month, which is worth knowing before you sign anything.

Get a quotation before you buy, not after. Premiums in parts of Tshwane differ sharply by suburb and by where the car sleeps at night, and some models carry conditions: an approved tracking unit, a garage rather than a driveway, a limit on the age of regular drivers. A car you can buy and cannot insure sensibly is not a bargain. Expect a tracking subscription of roughly R180 to R350 a month indicative on top of the premium.

Read what is excluded. Gravel damage to glass, tyre and rim damage, water ingress through a flooded low-water bridge, and theft while the keys are in the ignition at a filling station are all common exclusions or excess traps. If you tow a caravan to the coast once a year, tell the insurer; an undeclared tow bar has ended claims.

Work your fuel in rand per hundred kilometres rather than litres per hundred, because that is the number that lands in your account. A comfortable mid-size petrol car doing about eight litres per hundred on the open road costs roughly R175 per hundred kilometres at current pump prices, so Pretoria to Durban and back, about one thousand two hundred kilometres, is in the region of R2 100 in fuel alone.

Add the tolls. The N1 south and the N4 east both have plazas that add up, and a return trip to the Lowveld can carry a few hundred rand in toll fees for a light vehicle. Add a night somewhere, two coffee stops, and the slow deterioration of tyres, and a weekend away in a comfortable car costs what it costs. Knowing the figure in advance is what lets you enjoy the drive instead of counting it.