We tend to judge professional people on their willingness to take their own advice.

Should road testers have to prove that they've spent a significant sum on a car they've recommended as a requirement of some annual registration card, then? Should we give full transparency on what's on our driveways, so that readers can compare what we write with what we've actually bought?

Perhaps that would make it too easy to dismiss honest reviews - and indeed perfectly capable, trustworthy reviewers - for the wrong reasons. But for the moment I'd be in the clear, because I've just put some money where my big mouth is (or very recently was). It's not a totally unprecedented event, but the last time it happened was almost a decade ago, so I figured I could probably write about it without anyone assuming that I've won the lottery.

Our 11 March issue contained an eight-page group test of plug-in hybrid family SUVs, whose soporific effects you're hopefully over by now. It was won by the Skoda Kodiaq iV. And one of the very same has now taken up permanent residence on the Saunders family's block-paved driveway: a scarcely used Sportline in metallic Race Blue, supplied by Marshall Skoda of Milton Keynes. Light on options but with plenty of standard equipment, it would be a £48,500 car as a factory order today, and I paid £34,000 for it at nine months and 13,000 miles old.

I'm very happy with that, needless to say - and yet the story makes quite an interesting example of the slightly suboptimal state of new car buying in 2026, for several reasons.

First, it's not quite what I set out to buy. What I wanted was a Kodiaq iV with Dynamic Chassis Control, and this was the cheapest not-quite-year-old car in Skoda's main-dealer stock that had them. These adaptive dampers can be optioned on a lesser-trim model (which I'd rather have had) but very few owners go for them. Sportline cars get DCC as standard, though, so I've ended up buying a sporty-looking model because what I actually want is a comfier riding car. Which wasn't easy to explain to my other half, who assumed 'Sportline' was simply a sign of midlife crisis.

I mooched away from the showroom expecting to resolve to replace the standard 20in wheels with smaller ones with chunkier tyre sidewalls, but I'm pleased with how the car drives. The real-world 56-mile electric range that I wrote about in the aforementioned group test turns out to be true for my car. The adaptive dampers grant plenty of plushness to the ride. And the performance and refinement when the petrol engine is running are both good. So I'm giving the car high scores.

Not so the selling dealer. Skoda is the sort of brand that you expect to fare quite well in customer satisfaction surveys, but Marshall took £99 off me as an 'online reservation fee' that it failed to put towards the deal on the car, without explaining why. I'm now told a refund is coming, but I'm not sure if that's because I asked or because everybody gets one.

They also failed to properly clean the interior before handover, even after I had inspected the car and explicitly requested it be done. And it took two and a half hours to complete a very straightforward 'cash plus trade-in' showroom sale. Luckily I was happy being engaged in the process and had nowhere else to be.

Oddest of all, despite selling me something with 'Skoda Plus Approved Used' writ large in all the usual places, Marshall also failed to supply a car with working windscreen washer jets. Not a great advert for the fastidiousness of the checks, is it? When I phoned, the salesman suggested I call out breakdown recovery to fix it, and throw mud all over the windscreen for dramatic effect. I'm still not sure if he was actually joking, but it certainly wasn't a very helpful suggestion.

The washers will be fixed, of course. The car is good. I knew I wanted it - that very car - before turning up in the showroom and that little was likely to prevent me from buying it. I knew more about it, it turned out, than the perfectly pleasant chap from whom I bought it. I wasn't difficult. I didn't haggle; the price was fair. All Marshall had to do was a competent job of the nuts and bolts of the sale and handover, yet even here it made problems for itself where there simply shouldn't have been any.

In a volume car market beset with challenges in 2026, what excuse can there be for not getting the basics right? For not sending the ideal customer away absolutely delighted, not only with his once-in-a-decade purchase but also with how he came by it? Well, reader, I wasn't. "The trade' should and must do better.