Buying from a business and buying from a person are different activities. The premium exists for reasons. A dealer has prepared the car. The extent differs between businesses. Genuine mechanical work. Cleaning rather than repair. A specific question gets a specific answer. Consumer protections attach to trade sales. Local rules decide the extent. The general principle holds in most places. The private seller offers something different and underrated. You can talk to the person who drove it. Trade staff hold the history and not the experience. How it behaves on a cold morning, what it does on a long run, what has been replaced and why. This is genuinely valuable and mostly ignored. The cost of the private route is the absence of recourse. Which makes the examination carry the full weight. Trade sellers are not uniform. A small operation depending on local reputation behaves differently from a large one. The choice depends on a couple of factors. Your own ability to judge condition. And how badly an unexpected repair would land. Somebody confident and able to absorb a repair saves real money privately. Somebody uncertain and spookyswap article stretched by the purchase is buying a margin of safety. The right route varies by person. Anyone who has bought both ways matched the route to their own ability to judge.