The dash reads lower through a Ballarat winter. That is not the number we price on.
Every cold snap takes the estimate down, every spring hands it back, and somewhere in between an owner starts wondering whether the battery is going.
What we measure is not the thing that moves with the season, so the offer follows the reading rather than the figure you have been watching.
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Winter
What the cold takes, the spring gives back
The estimate on the dash is not the state of the battery, and a buyer who cannot tell the two apart prices for the worse of them.
You get in on a frosty morning and the car tells you it will go less far than you remember. The heater comes on and it says less again. You find yourself doing arithmetic on a trip you have done without thinking for years, and for the first time you are not quite sure about it. Then the weather turns, the figure climbs back to something that looks like the car you bought, and by the time you have stopped thinking about it the cold has come round again. After a few turns of that cycle it plants a question that never quite goes away.
Here is the distinction the whole thing turns on. The number on the dash is a prediction of how far the car thinks it can go, and it is worked out from how the car has been driven lately, what the heater is being asked to do and how cold everything is. State of health measures something else entirely. It is how much of the battery's original capacity is still in there, and it does not fall away when the mornings do. One of those two is the figure you have been staring at all season. The other is the one the offer is built on, and knowing it takes a reading rather than an opinion.
What that difference is worth usually goes to the other side of the table. Somebody who cannot separate the two has one safe move available, which is to treat the low figure as permanent and price accordingly, and there is nothing in that for them to explain to you afterwards. It is cheaper to assume than to measure. The inspector measures, at your home or your work and in front of you, and the offer follows what comes back. There is also a version of this that is not seasonal at all, a battery that has genuinely given ground over years and hands none of it back when the weather turns, and that conversation has a page of its own at the car where the battery is the whole discussion. Telling those two apart is exactly what the reading is for.
Through the seasons
What we ask about a car that works through the cold
The answers are all things you have watched happen, which is the part nobody else asks you for.
- What has the car been showing you, and does it move with the season?
- Read us whatever the car reports about itself, then say roughly what it does at the cold end of the year and what it does once that has passed. None of it replaces the reading taken at your place. It means the person who turns up already knows what you have been looking at, which is not how most of these conversations start.
- Has anything changed that the cold does not explain?
- Something that stayed odd after the weather warmed up. A trip that now needs a stop it never used to need. A warning that appeared once and has not been back. That is the answer worth having early, because ordinary cold behaviour and something a reading will pick up are not the same thing and it is better to know which is which before the day.
- Where does it spend the night?
- A garage, a carport, the driveway, or out on the street where the frost gets to it. It is worth knowing, because a car that sits out is stone cold before it goes anywhere and that accounts for a good deal of what an owner has been watching. It also tells the inspector what the visit looks like, whether there is room to work and somewhere to sit with the paperwork.
- Has the battery ever had work done on it, and did anything come back in writing?
- If the pack has been opened, if a module was changed, or if it went in for something that altered the way it behaves afterwards, we want to know who did it and whether there is paper for it. This is the one part of the conversation where a document is worth more than a good memory, and it works in your favour rather than against you.
- Has anybody put a number on it already, and what did they say about the battery?
- Tell us what the figure was and what reason came with it. If somebody quoted low and pointed at the range the car happened to be showing that week, that is worth hearing, because it usually means they read the dash and stopped there. We would far rather answer it now than run into it at the end.
Whatever the dash says
Three things the season does not decide
- The estimate is not what the offer is built on. A state of health reading is taken at your place and the number follows that, so what the weather was doing in the week you decided to sell does not end up in it.
- There is no reason to hold on until spring. Waiting for the figure on the dash to look better does not change what a reading of the capacity says, and it is the reading that is being priced. If you are ready now, being ready now is the whole of it.
- A finance payout is ours to handle. Tell us who it is with on the first call. We settle it directly with them, a car loan or a novated lease alike, and where the car is worth less than the balance that gap is written down and put in front of you before you sign.
We work out of 374 Settlement Rd, Thomastown VIC 3074. The inspector comes to you, which is the part that matters from here.
Every winter
Three the cold usually brings up
The range drops every winter. Does that mean the battery is failing?
Not on its own. What falls away in the cold and comes back when it warms up is the estimate the car is showing you rather than the capacity it is holding, and those are two different things. If the reading does turn up genuine wear behind it, you will be told what it said and the offer will account for it, which is still a better outcome than being priced by somebody who never measured anything.
Should I wait until it warms up before I sell?
There is nothing to be gained by waiting. The offer comes off the state of health reading rather than off the estimate on the dash, so a car sold in the cold and the same car sold once the weather has turned are measured in exactly the same way. If you are ready now, that is the only piece of timing that matters.
It charges more slowly on cold mornings. Is that going to be held against me?
No. The part worth telling us is whether it has changed compared with the winters before this one, because a change is information and we would rather have it early. What the cold does on an ordinary morning is not something anybody takes off the number.
Get the number off the battery rather than off the weather.
Or call us on 03 9000 0075 and talk it through first.