The first week with a car you have just bought

Two things are cheaper in this week than they will ever be again. The first is a defect: the less time the car has been with you, the easier it is to show it was already there, and the less argument there is about who caused it. The second is a wear item. A brake you find before you have driven two thousand kilometres on it is a brake, not brake damage.

There is a third point that has nothing to do with money. You have taken over not only a car but a stranger's maintenance decisions — which oil he used, which item he put off, which noise he trained himself to ignore. Those decisions carry on working, and nowhere are they written down in one place.

So the week has four jobs: get the paperwork straight, establish what actually belongs to the car, measure a baseline, and read the documents. All four together take one evening and one Saturday morning.

The procedure differs between countries and, within a country, often between regions or even between individual registration offices: who deregisters, who registers, in what order, with which documents and with which proof of insurance. What binds is always the office that enters the vehicle in the register — not what the seller said, and not what applied to your last car.

The point where it gets expensive is the cover gap. Between the moment the car becomes yours and the moment a valid liability policy runs on it, there must not be a single second in which it moves on a public road. Settle before the handover how the cover comes about, and get confirmation of the moment it starts.

After that, everything belongs in one place: purchase contract, registration documents, insurance policy, service book, invoices, inspection reports. One folder, physical or as photographs in a single directory on your phone. It costs twenty minutes, and it pays back in hard currency when you sell — documents on the table at the viewing move a price; documents you promise to send later do not.

A used car rarely comes complete. What is missing does not show while nothing happens, and becomes expensive at precisely the moment something does. Empty the car out once — boot floor, side compartments, tool box, glovebox, underfloor wells — and lay everything on a table.

You do not check the second key by looking at it. You check it by unlocking, locking and starting the engine with it. On a remote key the battery is part of that, and so is the mechanical emergency blade inside the housing. A key that merely looks like a key turns into a workshop appointment with programming the next time you lose the other one.

A baseline is not an inspection but a snapshot to compare against later. It consists of figures you take yourself, plus a date. Without it, in six months you will not know whether the oil level has dropped or was always where it is.

Tyre pressure is measured cold, that is before the car has been driven, and compared against the figure printed on the car itself — on the label in the driver's door aperture, inside the filler flap or in the glovebox. That label usually carries a second, higher figure for a fully loaded car. The number belongs to the vehicle, not to a guide; every model has its own.

Measure tread depth on every tyre at several points across the width, and expressly on the inner shoulder. That is precisely where a tyre wears first when the alignment is out, and precisely where you cannot see it if you only look from outside. Write down four figures, not one.

Plan a drive in the first week long enough for everything to get hot — engine, gearbox, differential, exhaust. A trip to the shops does not achieve that. Do it with the radio off and a window down at low speed, and treat every noise as information rather than as an annoyance.

On a straight road take your hands off the wheel briefly and see where the car goes — a road has camber, so a slight pull to the right is not automatically a finding. A pronounced pull is. A vibration that appears at one particular speed and disappears above it is an imbalance; one that grows steadily with speed is not.

Brake hard once from a higher speed, on an empty road, watching your mirror. You are testing three things: whether the car stays straight, whether the pedal pulses, and whether the travel to the pressure point changes when you brake twice in succession. Then the handbrake on a slope, with a gear engaged as a backup.

Spend an evening with the service book and the invoices and build two lists from them. The first: what was done, when, and at what mileage. The second, and it is the more important one: what never appears in the documents at all.

The items typically missing from a history are the ones that fall due by time rather than distance and that nobody notices while they are not done: brake fluid, coolant, automatic transmission oil, the oil in a multi-plate clutch in an all-wheel-drive line, differential oil, the cabin filter. None of them announces itself until it does.

The two lists become a plan for twelve months: what is certainly due, what is probably due, and what to have checked at the next workshop visit because the documents are silent on it. That plan is the difference between a repair that surprises you and an item you have time to get two quotes for.

The most common and most expensive mistake is the order: have it repaired, pay the invoice, and contact the seller afterwards. Doing it that way removes the evidence before anyone has seen it, and leaves you negotiating over an assertion.

The order that holds is a different one. Document it — photographs, date, mileage, a description of the symptom in your own words, no verdict on the cause. Then notify the seller in writing, factually, asking for a response by a stated date. Only then get a diagnosis, in writing, before anybody takes anything apart.

Which rights you have depends on whether the sale was private or commercial, in which country the contract was concluded, and what the contract says. That is not a footnote but the whole question — and it is answered by the legal system concerned, not by the seller and not by a guide. The documentation from the first step is useful under every one of those variants.

After the first week a car needs little, but it needs it regularly. Once a month the tyre pressure on a cold car and a walk round it, once a quarter the oil level, once a year an honest stocktake of the brakes. This is not pampering but bookkeeping: you are recording how the figures have moved against the baseline.

Every invoice goes into the same folder, immediately and not at the end of the year. When you sell, you are selling that folder too — and a buyer believes a stack of invoices more than any sentence in a listing. The stack cannot be assembled retrospectively.