Used Lynk & Co 01 inspection before you buy

For the Lynk & Co 01, yes: hire a mechanic to look at a car Budapest is our usual auto appraiser, done on site in Budapest with the report written in English. The name makes no difference to what we actually check. Engine, transmission, brakes, suspension, electronics and structure are all covered either way.

What goes wrong on a Lynk & Co 01 depends heavily on how it was used and maintained, so we look for the patterns that separate a sound car from a worn one. We also look at how the hybrid behaves in stop-start traffic and under load, since a failing battery or a cooling fault often shows itself there before any warning light appears. As an everyday car its wear is usually predictable - clutch and gearbox feel, suspension bushes, and the urban knocks, kerbed wheels and parking scrapes that accumulate over the years. Because this is a relatively new make, we focus on battery and software condition, recall completion and parts availability, while still running the full mechanical and structural inspection. We would rather you knew the Lynk & Co 01's weak points before you negotiated than after you collected the keys, so we check each one and tell you where this car stands.

Yes - book an inspection for each. Plenty of buyers have us check two shortlisted cars, including the Lynk & Co 01, before deciding which one to buy. Comparing two written reports side by side is often the clearest way to choose, because you are weighing documented condition rather than two sets of first impressions.

A typical on-site inspection of the Lynk & Co 01 takes around 60 to 90 minutes, depending on the car and how easy it is to access. Complex or high-spec cars can take a little longer, and we never rush the parts that matter. We would rather spend an extra ten minutes confirming a suspicion than hand you a report with a question mark in it.

We inspect the Lynk & Co 01 for physical evidence of accident repair - paint thickness, panel gaps, weld marks, replaced components and overspray. Combined with the visible structure and a diagnostic scan, this reveals far more than a clean-looking advert ever will. We can't pull every national crash database at the roadside, but a repaired structure leaves traces, and finding them is exactly what the inspection is for.

We connect a diagnostic scanner to read both stored and live fault codes on the Lynk & Co 01, including faults the dashboard never displays. If the engine light is on, you'll know exactly why before you buy, and whether it points to something minor or something expensive. If a seller has cleared the codes just before the viewing, that often shows up too.