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Quoted From killman:
Honorable Grasshopper, one thing that you do when buying a decent car from a dealer is to read usedcartips.org. This is a plain website written by a retired car salesman about all of the cons that new and used car salesmen will use on people during a car purchase. My father and step mother read the site and not very closely because it said used and not new car tips. They ended up having half the crappy cons that salesmen pull on customers at the last minute happen to them.
Tri9SS has nice points and I would like to add Autocheck to his list. This company is like Carfax, but may be able to check dealer records as well as auto auction data such as “Sold at auction – announced as frame damage” which was a real car that I came across. Autocheck can be used to double check Carfax and vice versa.
Most cars brands and models have similar issues that causes problems or break down time and time again. GM 3100/3400 have lower intake manifold gaskets that need replacing by 150k miles. Most Kia/Hyundai cars all seem to use timing belts on interference engines that really need to be changed on schedule if not earlier. VW DSG transaxles have had so many problems that the recent resale values of VW with DSG transaxles are $1-2k less than manual transaxles cars that cost $1k less in the first place.
Thanks for the great response killman! I’ll definitely go through usedcartips.org. I’ve stumbled across this site before, but I’ll read through the content in a bit more detail per your suggestion.
I agree with your suggestion on AutoCheck. I did a bit of analysis on different vehicle history report options myself, and I came to a similar conclusion: it’s really best to have both, esp. for a high value car. You can see what I came up with here (http://www.onpointinspection.com/articl … rt-enough/ ), but basically I found that you should check free gov’t databases first, then Autocheck, then maybe CarFax, but you shouldn’t really rely on any of those too much to catch problems.
Your information about the re-occuring repairs on certain makes and models is great – this is actually a big reason for the approach we are taking to optimize our inspection process! By taking 100s of thousands of parts replacement records, we can find trends for what parts fail more often than average on certain cars and highlight those parts for mechanics to check. When we get this capability up and running, I will be sure to check to see if we are able to predict these problems you point out here.
Similar to some of the snow ones, this happened in ATL earlier this year http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9xmp9wcrrw&feature=related