Test drives on expo day, and how to use eight minutes
A demonstration drive at a show is a fixed loop, a stranger in the passenger seat and about eight minutes of your hands on the wheel. Used properly those minutes answer things no brochure will.
A driver adjusting the seat of an unfamiliar car before a short demonstration loop
Understand what the loop is designed to do
Show loops are chosen to flatter. They are short, usually smooth, usually include one bit of open road for a burst of acceleration, and they almost never include a speed hump, a steep driveway entrance or a stretch of broken tar. Knowing that, you stop wasting the drive on acceleration, which every modern car does adequately, and you spend it on the things the loop was designed to hide.
Ask before you set off whether you may take a slightly different turn. Often the answer is no for insurance reasons, and sometimes at the quieter halls in Summerstrand the answer is yes if you keep to the agreed streets. It costs nothing to ask politely and it doubles the value of the drive.
The first ninety seconds belong to the seat
Before moving, set the seat the way you would for a run to Jeffreys Bay: height down, cushion tilted so your thigh is supported to within a hand's width of the knee, lumbar wound in until it feels slightly too much, mirrors set. If you cannot reach a comfortable position in ninety seconds with the car stationary, the car is not for you, and no amount of road time will fix it.
Check the things an older body cares about while you are stationary. How far you must twist to see over your right shoulder, whether the door aperture lets you get out without hauling on the frame, where the handbrake or its switch sits relative to your hip, and whether the pedals are offset to the left, which is common in cars converted to right-hand drive and ruins a long run.
On the move, listen more than you look
Put the radio off and the fan on low. You are listening for suspension noise over a manhole cover, a tick from the steering column at full lock, wind noise off the mirror at sixty, and whether the aircon compressor is audible when it cuts in. These are the sounds that become daily irritations and they are inaudible with music playing, which is why the stand always has music playing.
Brake once firmly, with warning to your passenger, on a clear stretch. Pedal feel at the top of the travel is worth knowing, and so is whether the nose dives more than you expect. Then do a single slow full-lock turn in a quiet corner and listen for the drivetrain, because a tight turn in a car park is most of urban driving in Central.
Questions for the person next to you
You have a captive specialist for eight minutes. Spend some of it asking what the service interval is, whether the plan covers a workshop in the Bay or wants you in East London, what the first set of tyres costs to replace in that size, and whether the insurance requires a tracker. A tracker requirement adds roughly R180 to R350 a month on indicative figures and nobody mentions it in the hall.
Ask also what the demonstration car has done in kilometres and how many drives it does on a show day. A car that has been started and stopped ninety times since Friday morning is not representing itself fairly, and a straight answer to that question tells you something about the person as well.
What a show drive cannot tell you
It cannot tell you about hour three in a seat, about the boot with real luggage in it, about a wet road, or about how the car behaves in a side wind on the N2 past the Van Stadens gorge. Treat the show drive as a screening tool that removes cars from your list, not as the evidence that puts one on it.
For the final two or three candidates, hire the type for a weekend or ask a dealer for a twenty-four hour loan. The cost, R850 to R1 600 a day on indicative rates for the comfortable classes, is small against a purchase you intend to keep for seven years. We say this to every reader who writes in, and the ones who do it never regret it.
Three things to take away
- Spend the first ninety seconds on seat setting, parked, before you move.
- Radio off, fan low: the drive is for listening, not for accelerating.
- Ask about tracker conditions; R180 to R350 a month changes the sums.
