According to a press release recently released to the press by car checking outfit My Car Check, your chances of inadvertently buying a used car that was previously written off vary quite a bit depending on where you buy it.
We know, right?! Who indeed would have thought!
“We only recently started analysing our data by location,” admits Check My Car bloke Roger P Owl, clearly something of a novice when it comes to PR and the dark arts of getting non-news stories into the pages of publications too cash-strapped to go out and find some proper news.
What My Car Cheque found, when they did start analysing their data by location, was, Rog says, quite surprising. For example, if you buy a used car in Glasgow or Edinburgh, there’s a one in seven chance it’s a reanimated write-off. Whereas, in seedy southern cities like London or Birmingham, one in four used cars is a former wreck.
More interestingly still (for lovers of locationally defined statistical comparisons, at least) is My Car Czech’s finding that comparing smaller towns and villages ‘throws up’ some even more extreme variations in write-off distribution by location.
Readers may be disturbed and unsettled to learn, for example, that in Billingshurst West Sussex, whose seemingly innocuous country town facade conceals a veritable hotbed of surreptitious write-off recycling, no fewer than 42.48% of used cars purchased and subsequently checked by My Car Čech turn out to be reconstituted write-offs.
If you find this revelation disturbing and unsettling, imagine how Des and Barry Welder of Welder Brothers Used Motors, Billingshurst’s sole used car outlet, feel. Bankstone News reckons Rog and his colleagues would be well advised to stay away from the Six Bells and other Billingshurst hostelries for a while.
Other locations whose used car fraternities will be less than thrilled by the publication of My CC’s geodata upload include: Dewsbury (36% write-off rate), Morden (35%), Halifax (34%) and Blackpool (34%).
If you fancy a trip to Farnborough, on the other hand, you have just a 5% chance of purchasing a former write off. But, then, who would!
Fancy a trip to Farnborough, that is.
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