For his father's car, he had changed his mind on the Tube to Fulham.
He had considered an Aston Martin. The gesture of it was appealing — the most prestigious available, the car that announced itself. But he thought about his father, and about what his father actually loved, and realised he had been thinking about the gesture rather than the person.
Arthur Weasley encountered Muggle engineering with the wonder of someone who found it genuinely beautiful — beautiful the way solutions were beautiful when constraints produced invention. He had a shed full of things he had taken apart and put back together and loved. He didn't need the most prestigious car. He needed the car he had already noticed.
Ron had found it in a motoring supplement his father had left folded to a specific page on the kitchen counter in June. Not circled, not annotated. Just left where someone might see it, in the specific way his father left things he wanted without knowing how to want them.
A Jaguar XJ6. 1990 priced around 9000 pounds or 450 galleons . Dark green exterior, cream leather interior.
The Fulham dealership was not a prestige address, but the car was there. The salesman was direct, the service history was complete, and the previous owner had been, he was told, a retired surgeon in Hampshire who had kept it garaged.
His father would enchant it within the first month. He would make the engine run on something that wasn't petrol. He would almost certainly enchant it to fly, which he would consider a reasonable modification. He would keep it in better conditions than the shed deserved and would show it to anyone who asked with the enthusiasm of someone given the most interesting possible thing to work with.
'Yes,' Ron said. 'I'll take it.'