Your Atto 3 is a car, not a badge to guess at.
Somebody who does not know a badge protects themselves by taking money off it, and their caution comes out of your car.
We read the car in front of us. The instrument does not care about the badge.
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The badge
Confidence is what is missing, and it gets charged to you
There is nothing exotic about assessing an Atto 3. What a generic buyer lacks in front of one is familiarity, and unfamiliarity is expensive when somebody else is paying for it.
If you have already had this car looked at, you may have noticed how fast the conversation moved on to what it is not. That is what tends to happen when a buyer is asked to put real money against a badge they have not handled often. They cannot see the risk clearly, so they price it high enough to be safe whatever it turns out to be, and the safety they are buying is funded entirely by you.
State of health is how much of the original battery capacity is left, and it is a reading rather than an opinion. It is taken the same way on an Atto 3 as on anything else here that plugs in, and on a car that runs on a battery it moves the value more than kilometres do. The rest is ordinary car assessment, tyres, panels, glass and the service record, and none of that changes with the name on the bonnet either.
What does change is what came with the car, because somebody who has not sold one before does not know what to ask you for. That is where the money leaks quietly on an Atto 3, not in the valuation but in the things that are never mentioned and so are never counted. The questions underneath are the ones we ask, and all of them are worth answering before anyone puts a figure on your car.
In the driveway
What we ask about an Atto 3
Five questions, and not one of them has anything to do with how well known the badge is.
- Which portable charger came with it?
- Say which one, and say whether the bag it lives in is still around. Charging gear is priced as part of the car rather than treated as something thrown in with it, so what is in the boot is money rather than clutter.
- Are the adapters from the box still with it?
- Small items wander off across a few years of owning a car, and they are worth hunting down before the inspector arrives. Whatever is in the boot on the day gets counted on the day. Whatever surfaces a week later does not.
- Was a wall box part of the deal, and is it coming with the car?
- This is the one people forget. A box on the garage wall is either part of what you are selling or part of the house you are staying in, and we need to know which before anything is priced. If it stays, that is completely fine, we simply value the car without it.
- Where has it been serviced, and is the book stamped?
- Dealer or independent, both are good answers. What helps is having the record sitting in the car on the day rather than a promise to dig it out afterwards, because an inspector can only take account of what is actually in front of them.
- Do you still have the paperwork from when you bought it?
- On a car that a buyer has not valued often, the handover paperwork settles what came with it and what was added later, so none of that has to be decided by anybody's memory. If it has gone, we are not going to make a fuss about it.
Whatever the badge
Three things the name on the bonnet does not touch
- The reading is the reading. State of health is measured on an Atto 3 with the same instrument we would use on anything else that plugs in, and the figure the offer is built on comes off that.
- What came in the box is money. Cables, the portable charger, the wall box if it is leaving with the car. Name what is included and it is priced. Leave it unmentioned and it travels away with the car for nothing.
- The valuation is not somebody's first attempt. There are 20 years in the Australian car trade behind it, and the part of that you actually benefit from is knowing what to ask about a car before putting a number on it.
Before you call
Three questions Atto 3 owners put to us
Will an unfamiliar badge cost me on the offer?
Not here. We buy electric, plug in hybrid, hybrid and mild hybrid cars of every make, so an Atto 3 is not an unusual thing to be standing in front of. The offer comes off the state of health reading and the condition of the car itself.
Do I need the original charging cable to sell it?
No. Missing gear changes the number rather than the answer. If something has gone astray, say so on the call and it is accounted for openly instead of turning up as a surprise in your driveway.
Should I wait and see whether the badge becomes better known?
That is not a call we can make for you, and we are not going to pretend to know what any car does next. What we can tell you is that our offer is built on the reading and the condition on the day, and there is nothing in it designed to hurry you.
Have the car read, rather than the badge guessed at.
Or call us on 03 9000 0075 and talk it through first.