Two years ago Ken Officer was driving home to Southland from a Dunedin medical appointment with a fresh diagnosis of congestive heart failure and a prognosis of roughly six months. Somewhere on that trip he decided he wanted a car.

The car he found, in Mosgiel, was a restored 1962 Austin Cambridge. He and his wife Yvonne took it home to Otatara, where they had the garage space for it, and he has been driving it since.

Now the Invercargill couple, both in their 80s, are preparing to move into the city, and there will be nowhere to keep the 64-year-old British saloon. Rather than sell it, they have donated the car to Hospice Southland. The hospice will organise an auction and keep whatever it fetches, the Otago Daily Times reported on Thursday.

Mr Officer told the paper he had not been prepared to sit around feeling sorry for himself after the diagnosis. His cardiologist has since found his condition has barely changed in two years, and Mr Officer joked that he had so far managed to keep the Grim Reaper waiting.

He has a long connection with the hospice. He goes to a weekly group there for people living with a terminal diagnosis, which he described as a gathering where people who are often very sick choose to focus on company, laughter and getting on with life rather than their illnesses. Years earlier, when he belonged to the Lions Club in Invercargill East, he was among the volunteers who washed the outside windows of the hospice building.

Lucy Parkhill, who leads partnerships and fundraising for the hospice, said the gift would leave a lasting mark on the organisation.

The story has already travelled well beyond Southland. A social media post about the car had been viewed close to 200,000 times by the time the ODT spoke to the couple.

The Austin Cambridge was a familiar family car on New Zealand roads in the 1960s, and tidy examples are now sought after by classic car enthusiasts. The Officers' car is described as being in excellent condition.

Hospice Southland provides palliative care across the region and, like hospices around the country, depends on community fundraising to top up its government funding. Earlier this week the Herald reported a quiz night at ILT Stadium raising money for other local causes; the car auction adds a rather larger lot to Southland's fundraising calendar for the summer.

No date, venue or format for the auction has been announced yet. Hospice Southland is expected to release details once arrangements are made, and anyone interested in bidding can contact the hospice directly.