Reading a service book like a buyer, not a fan

Put the book on the bonnet and work through it with a pen. Write down the kilometres at each stamp and the gap between them. A car serviced every 15 000 km like clockwork for five visits and then nothing for 60 000 km has had a bad patch in its life, and that patch is usually a change of owner, a retrenchment or a move to a town with no agent.

Look at who did the work. A franchise workshop for the first three services and then a known independent in Silverton or Centurion is a perfectly healthy pattern and often means a careful owner avoiding franchise labour rates. Six different workshops in six services is a car that has been passed around. Phone the last workshop on the list; most will tell you plainly what they did and whether they warned the owner about anything.

On a belt-driven engine the cambelt is the one item that turns a careful purchase into a catastrophe. Intervals in this market sit broadly between 90 000 km and 120 000 km, or a set number of years when the kilometres are low, and the belt does not care which milestone it reaches first. A belt kit with the water pump and tensioners at a good independent runs from about R6 500 to R14 000 indicative depending on how buried the engine is.

If the book shows no belt and the car is near the interval, the fix is simple: assume you are paying for it and take it off the price, or make the sale conditional on the work being done before handover. What you must not do is accept the sentence we hear every month, that the previous owner probably had it done. A broken belt bends valves, and on a modern four-cylinder that is a R45 000 engine strip indicative, which is often more than the car is worth.

Published intervals assume reasonable conditions, and a lot of Gauteng driving is not. Short runs from Hazelwood to Menlyn and back never get the oil properly hot, dust off the gravel into the plots east of the city clogs filters early, and standing in traffic on the N1 at Brakfontein cooks an automatic transmission far harder than cruising does. If the car has lived a short-trip life, bring the oil change forward rather than arguing about it.

Ask specifically about the gearbox. A lot of owners believe sealed automatics never need attention, and a lot of expensive repairs follow that belief. An oil and filter service on a torque-converter automatic is in the region of R3 800 to R7 500 indicative at an independent specialist, and a car with a hundred and sixty thousand kilometres and no gearbox service in the book should be priced with that in mind.

Many cars now carry their history on a manufacturer system rather than in a booklet, which is better evidence when you can get it and no evidence at all when you cannot. A dealer can usually pull a printout. A private seller often cannot, and that is not automatically suspicious: people lose logins, cars come out of estates, fleet cars arrive with nothing but a sticker on the windscreen.

Where the record has a hole, look for the physical traces of care instead. Fresh oil of the right grade, a filter with a workshop's date written on it in marker, brake fluid that is still straw-coloured rather than dark, a radiator cap that comes off without a fight. A car that has been looked after smells and feels different inside the engine bay, and a buyer who has opened fifty bonnets starts to know it.

We work in deductions, not feelings. List every service item the book cannot prove: cambelt kit, gearbox oil, brake fluid, coolant change, spark plugs, cabin and air filters, and the two front tyres you are not happy with. Price each at a Pretoria independent, add them up, and that is your opening deduction. On a mid-size family car it lands somewhere between R12 000 and R25 000 more often than people expect.

Then decide whether you still want it. Sometimes a car with a thin history and a good body is the better buy, because the mechanical items are known quantities and the panel work is not. Our own bias is clear: we would rather take on a car with honest neglect and a straight shell than a car with perfect stamps and a repaired front end.