Our resident motoring expert Paddy Comyn is starting a brand-new Car Clinic where he will answer all your motoring questions and queries. Whether it’s specific advice on an upcoming purchase or a technical question about a mooted national policy, he wants to help. If you have a query or question, please send it along with the subject line CAR CLINIC to motoring@thejournal.ie 

I’VE BEEN AROUND the car world all my life in various shapes and forms, and I’ve written here before about how it all started for me.

Growing up in the house of a car journalist and seeing my Uncle Gerry on my mom’s side with his passion for old cars was the perfect recipe for creating a car nut. Gerry died a few years ago. He was a pathologically content man who loved to tinker with old Fiats, a tradition that has passed to his son (my cousin Alan) and in turn to his son, Stephen.

We all have that strange affliction of seeing cars as having personalities and souls. Not everyone has that, of course, nor should they. We can make very boring dinner-party guests.

Over the years, though, I’d say I’ve developed one genuinely useful skill: I can match a person to a car pretty well.

I tend to be the guy people ring, and they invariably start with, “I am thinking of changing the car.” The filing system in my head starts to organise the options – not in a slick ChatGPT way, but more like the slow, methodical churnings of an early 20th-century fairground attraction.

It’s an “I know I left it here somewhere” sort of system, housed in a cluttered and scattered brain.

My best friend Colm changes his car every few years and you have never met someone who does more research on anything. He moved to an EV a few years ago (he now has two) and he now knows more about EVs than, well I do.

Yet he still has to have the full analysis of the thought process down the phone to me, which of course is delightful, but like many buyers, he has already made up his mind, but just needs someone to say yes, you’ve made the right decision.

So without having me locked in your basement. How do you buy a car?

Well........

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