I will never dispose of it, says man who uses Peugeot 505 for 30 years

Without any delay, Alhaji Ibrahim, who was then the sales manager of Arewa Textiles in Kaduna, quickly sold his car, got a loan and bought the car of his dream from Peugeot Automobile Nigeria (PAN) Limited. Since then (that is 30 years now), he has been cruising the vehicle without contemplating to let it go. […]

Without any delay, Alhaji Ibrahim, who was then the sales manager of Arewa Textiles in Kaduna, quickly sold his car, got a loan and bought the car of his dream from Peugeot Automobile Nigeria (PAN) Limited. Since then (that is 30 years now), he has been cruising the vehicle without contemplating to let it go.

“It cost me a little over N15,000 to acquire,” he said, admiring the blue-colour Peugeot saloon car parked outside his home. Outwardly, save for a broken wing mirror, nothing about the car showed that it has been on the road for three decades.

And for the engine, its owner could confidently boast: “Now if I fill my tank, I can go to Lagos.”

After Alhaji Ibrahim bought his car in 1982, two of his friends admired and bought one each for themselves. While he could not recall how one of them disposed of his car, the grey-haired retiree remembered everything about the other. “He purchased it about four months after mine and sold it to a businessman in Kantin Kwari market. The carcass of the car is just there at the mechanic’s garage. Every day I go there to service my own car, I see it,” he explained.

Death of contemporaries of his car did not just stop at his close friends, Alhaji Ibrahim recollected, saying every other Peugeot 505 he knew to be as old as his own, was longer “on the road.”

Three decades old and yet the vehicle is breaking more records. In the same year it was bought 30 years ago, a baby was born into the family of Alhaji Ibrahim. That child, who is now as old as the car, is the one using it to attend lectures at the university.

The father of 18 told Sunday Trust that the secret behind the seeming unparalleled longevity of his Peugeot automobile is regular maintenance.

“I remember going to Tiga (dam) to buy fish in the Volvo I bought from Briscoe. On my way back, the car overheated. It was on a Sunday evening. So I had to leave it there. The following morning I went to Briscoe. It was the first incident I had, that time I didn’t have Peugeot. So I took my maintenance file to the workshop manager in Briscoe and told him what happened. After checking my maintenance schedule, he sent a towing vehicle and they towed and repaired the car free of charge,” he narrated.

Apart from the 30-year-old car, Alhaji Ibrahim disclosed that he had also used a Peugeot 504 for close to 24 years before disposing it. Yet he still drives a Mercedes Benz car he bought in 1987.

According to him, his way with keeping cars in good shape does not stop at the ones in his personal fleet. “When I was working for the Katsina State government as a commissioner in the electoral commission, I was assigned a 504 as official car for four years. By the time I returned it, people were saying this car is not more than four or five months. I believe in maintenance and whichever car I have, I maintain it excellently, because I know how difficult it is to get it.”

Only about five years ago, he encountered, for the first time, what he described as ‘fault’ from his Peugeot 505, which he attributed to human error. “I asked my son to gauge the water in the radiator and he did without closing the radiator cover tightly. So I travelled to Katsina with the car, with air condition on. On my way back, I noticed a change in its sound, so I switched off the AC and parked. I discovered that the radiator cover had fallen and the water had drained out. I phoned my mechanic and the following morning we went back with a top cylinder gasket and fixed it. And before 12pm, we were back in Kano,” he related.

Alhaji Ibrahim has vowed not to sell his old car no matter the price. The old man recalled that his children been inundating him with complaints about the vehicle being an old one and needs to be changed, saying he often counter them with the answer: “that is your problem.”

“My own problem is not a car or a house. My own problem is for you to get educated,” he would tell the children in defence of his car. Not satisfied, one of the children attempted to sell it without his consent, on the grounds that its proceeds could be used to buy another car, explained. “They went and priced it N350,000 and my mechanic phoned me, saying ‘Alhaji instead of taking that N350,000, why not keep that car, it would serve you more than the amount’.”

“If I had the N350,000, it would not buy me another car. And even if it buys me another one, the durability will not be there. So I asked my children, ‘why do you bother yourselves when this car is still working? If you want, save and buy the car of your choice.”

Just as he is not comfortable with the idea of disposing the car, Alhaji Ibrahim is not keen to owning modern ones. “There are many flashy cars around; coupled with the fact that everything has been computerized. But if it comes to durability and maintenance, you cannot compare them to the ones of those years. If you take wrong or adulterated fuel, for instance, you will find your vehicle stopping on the road. That is very common with most of these sophisticated cars. But this car, anything you put to it, it will still go. And with the attitude of our drivers, you can be sure if somebody hits you, it is his vehicle that will suffer.”

“The innovation is ok. But honestly speaking, we need these types of cars on Nigerian roads now.  More so, any village you stop, you will get the spare parts. But for some of these (modern) cars, there are some mechanics who don’t even know what to do to them when they get problem. As for this one, any mechanic anywhere in Nigeria can repair it for you,” he argued.