How to Take a Test Drive in a New Car

Test-driving a new car does not have to be difficult or taxing, but you need to be able to focus on what you're doing without the car salesman or saleswoman yammering in your ear. You want to be able to hear the car as it works, feel the controls under your hands to see how it handles and judge for yourself if the automobile meets your needs.

Contrary to popular belief, a test drive is not just a prelude to negotiating the price. There are specific actions that you need to take to be sure that the car of your dreams actually works as well as you hope.

And, no matter what the sales team says, you will be doing yourself a favor if you go into the dealership for a test drive, period. Save the price negotiations for another day.

Instructions

Visual Inspection

1

Before you even get behind the wheel, do a visual inspection just like airline pilots do. You need to look the vehicle over to ascertain if it has all the features that you want.

Open the trunk and check space available for groceries, children's bicycles or your golf clubs. You need room enough in the trunk to easily carry everything you need in your family's day-to-day life.

2

Open and close all the doors. Listen carefully to how loudly or quietly the doors close. Check to see if the doors seem solid or heavy. You want to make sure that your children will not have trouble closing them.

3

Lock and unlock the doors. Listen again to hear how loudly or quietly the locks work. Check to see that the mechanism is easy to use and easy to understand.

Also, if you have a family, you may want a car with those special kid safety locks so that the children cannot open the back doors from the inside of the car. Check to see if the car you are test driving has them.

4

Put all of the windows up and down. Notice how loud they are when you do this and how difficult or easy it is to maneuver them.

Comfort

5

Get inside the car and think about your own and your family's comfort.

Move around in the driver's seat to see if it's comfortable for you. You want room enough to accommodate your size but not so much room that you can't reach the heat, radio or wiper controls. Check the space in the the front passenger seat and the back seats, as well.

If you are considering a mini-van or SUV, try sitting in the middle and back rows of the vehicle to see how comfortable they are.

6

Adjust the driver's seat to see how easy it is to maneuver and to see how much room you have. Check to be sure there is enough leg room for your spouse as well as yourself. Also, check to make sure that the driver's seat will adjust to fit the height of all the drivers in your family.

Sit in the back seat and check the leg room there. Will your children or adult passengers have enough leg room in the back seats of the vehicle?

7

From the driver's seat, look at the instrument panel. You need to able to easily reach the steering wheel, the brakes and the gas pedal. Look at all the various gauges to ascertain if they make sense.

Try the windshield wipers to make sure that they work easily. Try out the intermittent wiper feature and mist the windshield with the wiper fluid. Do the wipers do a good job of clearing off the windshield?

8

Turn on the heat and then the air. Make sure that the controls are easy to understand and to manipulate. Wait a minute or so before the switch from heat to air so that you can feel how quickly the temperature changes in the vehicle. Look to see if the vents are adjustable. Try out the defroster features and see how well they work.

9

Turn on the stereo. Try out the test CD or cassette you brought with you. Turn the bass all the way up. Play with the levels on the various speakers. Make sure that you can hear the difference when you change the levels.

Handling

10

When you take the car off the car lot, you want to test out all of the systems to make sure that the car has the performance that you want.

Test the brakes. Make sure that the emergency brake works. Then brake slowly and carefully. Check how quickly the brakes grab and how soon you can feel the car slowing down.

Hit the brakes hard. How does the car handle when you do this? Does the car pull to one side or the other?

11

Test the steering by going around various kinds of corners. Corner smoothly and slowly but also take a few corners quickly.

Find a parking lot and practice figure eights. Make long lazy figures and tight short ones. You are checking on the turning radius of the car. You want to know if it is difficult to turn or easy to turn.

12

Think about the way you typically drive. If you commute to work, take the car out on the highway and see how easily it passes other cars. Take it through stop-and-go traffic and see how it responds. Drive through subdivisions with speed bumps every few blocks and over rough roads to see how it handles.

13

As you drive over speed bumps and rough roads, check the noise in the car. Can you hear the stereo over the sound of the bumps? Try talking to the sales rep and see if you can understand the answers.

Feel

14

Look at the subjective aspects of the car and see how you feel about driving it. For example, you want to be able to see through the windshield easily. You need to feel as if you can see everything that you want to see on the road ahead of you.

15

Check for the blind spot on the back windshield. Look to make sure that you can see every angle of your car from the mirrors. Adjust the mirrors and note how easily they adjust to the angles you want.

16

Think about how much room the car has and if that room will be able to meet your needs. If you or your children play on a team, car pool or plant a garden every year, you want to make sure that the vehicle can handle all these space requirements. Check to see if the back seat or seats fold down to accommodate larger loads or moving.

17

Think about the instrument panel on the car. You want to feel comfortable using it every day. Make sure that you can reach everything easily including the gas latch, the trunk latch and the hood latch.

Look for a built-in change holder for tolls or a cubbyhole for your electronic toll device. Check the glove box to make sure that all of your documents will fit into the space. Look for a built-in space for music storage.

18

Think about the "cockpit" in the driver's seat. You want it to be easy to navigate. You also want to be able to imagine yourself comfortably inside this car every day for a long time. Make sure that the space will also be comfortable for your spouse.