Used 4x4s and off-roaders in Málaga

A used hatchback can be judged fairly well on three numbers: year, mileage and service history. An off-roader cannot. Two vehicles of the same year with the same mileage can be in completely different condition depending on the life they have had: one did the school run and the beach, the other towed a horsebox down farm tracks for eight years. Mileage does not tell those two lives apart, and neither do the price guides.

So when we buy, we ask what the vehicle has been used for and look for the evidence that backs it up: a tow bar, battered underbody protection, odd tyre wear, suspension tired on one side only. None of that rules a car out on its own, but it changes the price that makes sense to pay for it, and it changes what has to be put right before we hand it over.

Three different things get sold under the same label. The first is four-wheel drive with a low range — a genuine off-roader: short gearing, real towing and climbing ability, usually on a separate chassis. That is what you need if you are going to do proper off-road work, tow regularly or run up mountain tracks.

The second is the all-wheel drive on modern SUVs, which sends torque between the axles when it senses a wheel slipping. It is excellent on wet roads, on a dirt track or up a steep drive to a country house, it uses noticeably less fuel, and it is what most people actually need. What it is not is a substitute for a low range in serious off-road use.

The third is front-wheel-drive SUVs, which are perfectly good cars but are not 4x4s however much they look like one from the outside. We say so plainly on every listing, because buying the third thinking it is the first is the most common disappointment in this market.

An off-roader has parts a normal car does not, and almost nobody remembers them: transfer case, differentials, propshafts, wheel hubs. Each has its own oil and its own change interval, and none of it appears in the "normal" service at the garage down the road. When that oil has gone two hundred thousand kilometres untouched, the vehicle still works — but it is spending service life it will not get back.

Modern diesels have a similar story with the turbo and the particulate filter, especially where the vehicle has lived on short urban journeys. It is the fault that causes the most grief on a used diesel SUV, and much of it can be caught before you buy if you know what to ask and what to look for in the ECU.

That is why we would rather you brought your own mechanic. It does not bother us and it does not make us uncomfortable: if one of our cars cannot survive an independent inspection, that is our problem, not yours.

This is the question we get asked most, and the short answer that goes around ("a diesel from 2015 is C, one from 2006 to 2014 is B") is only an approximation that fails in both directions. The badge belongs to the registration plate, not to the model or the year: it depends on the Euro standard that particular car was type-approved to, on whether it is a plug-in hybrid and how much electric range it has, and on whether it has a gas conversion. Two identical cars from the same year can carry different badges.

Málaga has a low-emission zone, as Madrid and Barcelona do, so this is not a detail: a car advertised as ECO that is really a B cannot go where its owner thought it could. That is why we never work it out from the year. We check the plate against the DGT's official lookup and tell you which badge the car carries before you sign anything.