What a UAE summer does to a used car

A car that has spent five summers in the UAE is not the same as one that has covered the same distance in a cooler country. Heat does damage that the odometer does not record, and it concentrates on a short list of parts.

If you are buying in September or October, this is the list to check.

The battery

The single most common reason a car stops in the UAE. Heat, not cold, is what kills batteries: it accelerates the chemistry inside them, and a battery that would last five years elsewhere typically manages two to three here.

A battery older than two years has already had the hardest part of its life. Find the date sticker on the top. If the car has been standing at a dealer through August, assume it has had a hard time.

The tyres

Road surfaces reach seventy to eighty degrees on a summer afternoon, and the air inside a tyre expands as it heats. A tyre that is already over-inflated or worn thin is the one that fails.

Check the four-digit date code on the sidewall, not just the tread. Rubber hardens with heat and age, and a tyre with plenty of tread but five UAE summers behind it has lost grip it will not get back.

The air conditioning

Test it properly. Start the car cold, run the air conditioning on full, and wait several minutes. It should be genuinely cold, not merely cool, and it should stay cold while the car idles in traffic.

Weak air conditioning in October is not a small fault. It is a system that has worked hard all summer and is telling you so, and compressor work is expensive.

Paint, plastics and rubber

Look at the roof, the bonnet and the top of the boot — the horizontal surfaces that take the sun all day. Clear coat fails there first. Check the rubber door seals for cracking and the dashboard for lifting or warping.

None of these stop the car. All of them tell you how the car was kept, and a car that lived outside for five years has usually been treated as a tool rather than an asset.

What this means for the price

Fleet operators report that somewhere between forty-five and sixty per cent of summer breakdowns come down to overheating, batteries, air conditioning and tyres.

Those are all things you can check in twenty minutes before you buy, and all things worth negotiating over once you have. A car needing a battery and two tyres is not a bad car — it is a car with a known bill attached, and that bill belongs in the price.