Selling a car you love is a strange experience. You've made the decision — the sensible one, probably — and yet something about handing over the keys feels wrong. That feeling usually goes away. Sometimes it doesn't.
Before the transaction is complete, there are a few things worth doing. Not to talk yourself out of selling, but to make sure you don't end up with nothing but a gap on the drive and a memory that fades faster than you expect.
Take proper photographs
Not the ones you take for the listing — those are lit for buyers, not for you. Before you list it, take an hour and photograph the car the way you actually want to remember it.
Take it somewhere you associate with it. The road where you first pushed it properly. The hill with the view. Outside the place you drove to the day you bought it. Park it and shoot it in good light — early morning or late afternoon — from the angles that show it at its best. Get low. Get close. Shoot the details: the wheel design, the badge, the interior, the way the light falls on the paint.
These photographs are for you, not for AutoTrader.
Write down the things no buyer will ever know
Every car accumulates a private history. The strange noise that turned out to be nothing. The long drive you did in it the first week. The modifications you made and why. The moment it surprised you by being better than expected.
Write it down. Not in a format for anyone else — just for you. A car's history doesn't live in the logbook; it lives in the person who drove it. Once it's gone, that version of the story goes with you whether you've recorded it or not.
Get the portrait made
This is best done before you list it, while you still have full access to the car and can take as many photographs as you need. Once it's sold, you're working from whatever you managed to capture.
Alive My Ride takes your photographs and creates a cinematic portrait — your car in dramatic lighting and a setting that suits it. Not the flat, bright listing photos. The version of the car that exists in your memory of it: at its best, in the right light, looking exactly the way it always did in your head.
The process takes minutes and costs from £10. A framed print costs rather less than the tank of fuel you'll put in the replacement.
Do the final drive properly
Don't let the last drive be the handover trip to meet the buyer. Go out the evening before. Drive the roads you like. Don't go anywhere in particular. Just drive it the way you always wanted to — without a destination or a schedule — and pay attention to how it feels.
You'll probably remember that drive more clearly than most of the others.
Keep the logbook entry
When you hand the car over, you fill in the V5C and that's the end of the official record. But keep a copy of the registration, the last MOT certificate, and anything else that proves the car was real and was yours. Decades from now, when someone asks you about it, you'll want something to hold.
The car you're selling is probably not the last car you'll love. But it's the one you love right now, and that's worth treating with a little ceremony before it goes.