I got burned. So I built the tool I wished existed.

A few years ago I bought a Volkswagen Golf R from a private seller. It was the car I’d wanted for years. It looked immaculate, pulled hard and clean on the test drive, and the seller seemed like a genuinely good guy with a folder full of paperwork. I transferred the money that afternoon and drove it home grinning.

Four months later it went into limp mode on the motorway. The engine was done. What followed was months of quotes, parts delays, and workshop invoices — by the time the car was right again, it had cost me over $12,000on top of what I’d paid for it.

Here’s the part that still stings: the signs were there. A gap in the service history. A couple of things under the bonnet that weren’t factory. The way it had clearly been driven. None of it registered, because standing next to the car I had no idea what to look for, what to listen for, or what questions to ask. I wasn’t stupid — I just didn’t know what I didn’t know.

So I built the tool I wished I’d had that day. That tool became KickTyres.

It’s simple to use. You tell it what car you’re looking at, and it builds an inspection for that exact make, model, and year — what to look at, what to listen for, what to ask the seller. You walk around the car with your phone, answer plain-English questions, and take photos where it asks. At the end you get a straight answer: what’s wrong, roughly what it costs to put right, what the car is actually worth, and what to say when you negotiate.

I’ve run it on every car I’ve looked at since. The first time, it caught an issue the seller hadn’t mentioned — I negotiated the price down on the spot and had it fixed for a fraction of the discount. That’s the whole idea: know before you pay, not after.

I’m not a mechanic, and KickTyres doesn’t pretend to be one either. I’m someone who got burned and decided it wasn’t going to happen again — to me, or to anyone else standing in a driveway in New Zealand about to hand over their savings. KickTyres is everything I learned the hard way, packaged so you get the answer before you pay.