I don't think I've ever asked the number of previous owners when I've viewed/bought a car.
Well, not unless I've gone there with an idea that the car/garage is a shady one and I want to get my facts straight before I tell them to get lost because of x, y, & z - and that's only so that I can report it back to other interested parties by posting it on a forum, so they don't have to listen to the same BS from the garage.
I remember when I was looking for another e34 M5, and went to a garage in Yorkshire that had a bit of a bad reputation on the forums. I thought that despite their reputation I'd go and look at / drive the car, and then negotiate the price based on the assumption that if anything was to go wrong the garage would do SFA about it.
Phoned a week before to arrange to view it (200 mile round trip). Said I was a current M5 owner so knew about common faults/corrosion areas/etc. Asked about service history, documentation, bodywork/interior condition/etc.
Was told that it was A1 and it had been part-exchanged - by a middle-aged guy who wanted something a bit more restrained - for a S500 Merc. So it was only on 50k miles (not bad for a 10 year old M5), stunning anthracite cloth/alcantara interior (my favourite), cosmos black, fully optioned with electric rear blinds and rear non-bench option (2 proper seats + fixed armrest instead of 2+ small one in the middle and drop-down armrest).
Turned up on the Saturday to find the car in the back of the garage with about a foot between it, the fence behind and the cars surrounding it. Dealer says he didn't have time to move the other cars around which means not only can I not test drive it, but I can't get in to see the state of the bodywork/interior properly.
Ask him if he's willing to move the cars around so that I can have a good look, and he says he's busy with another customer (buying a £2k runaround, versus me with £13k for the M5) and he'd give me the paperwork to look over whilst he sorting them out. This turned out to be a godsend, as the docs showed very little. The full history turned out to be a A4 piece of paper with a list of work supposedly carried (no invoices to prove though), a couple of receipts for petrol and a couple for tyres (which were for the wrong size tyres, so obviously not for this car).
Dealer comes back and I ask him for the rest of the documentation. He tells me that this is all he was given and it was more than he normally gets. So I ask if he's got any contact details for the previous owner (who he now says bought it from new) and he says he'll have to get in touch with him to find out if he wants to talk to me. 5 minutes later he's back and says the previous owner is not interested.
So after 2 hours of driving, 1 hour of waiting around, I've got a dealer with a car that he's trying to get me to buy without driving or inspecting properly, with a dodgy history and story of 1 owner.
You can probably guess that I simply handed my money over and drove it off without a care in the world :roll:
Although I did post my initial (and other members posted their) views on the car to the guys on the M5 forum who were interested. Think the car sold about 2 years later for £8k with the same mileage/issues. Issues being rusted filler cap area, dented boot (looked like a forced entry attempt), very unevenly worn tyres (i.e. geometry/suspension issues), leaking dampers (£1000 a corner), misfire at low revs (no-one actually managed a test drive though, so it might simply have been water in the fuel from sitting so long), silver & not anthracite interior - and to cap it all, it had been parked with a rear window open for a couple of months and the nearside rear interior was ruined.
1066 Country
By the seaside...
