My husband’s truck went south a couple weeks ago so we’re shopping for another one. Used, nothing fancy, ya know, but it has to be reliable for a few years and it has to be safe.
First place we went was about an hour away. I’d talked to them on the phone several times and each time they assured me that every thing was on track to drive it away that day.
We got there and it was “being serviced.” The dash was on the ground next to it with dust on it.
Hubby got on the floor and looked under it. The rear end looked brand new.
So, we started asking some new questions. Seems the owner liked to take it out fishing. Oh and the dash was cracked, so they had to replace it but their mechanic (of 20 years) got one out of a wreck and the odometer had 100K more miles on it than the original and was having trouble adjusting it.
We left.
On the way home hubby sprang for the $60 for Carfax. I think the only things on the car that hadn’t been changed were the windshield wipers.
So, we have Carfax. I start researching some of the others I’d found and 3 out of the 15 or so, we were thinking about, had been totaled!
One other had the mileage listed a couple thousand less than Carfax had 8 months ago.
Not one of the sales people I’d talked to breathed a word of it.
I know it was juvenile, but I spent part of this morning calling each of them back and whaled on them. I know it did no good, but I feel better.
The good news is we found one that sounds pretty good. We go see it tomorrow.
Most reputable dealerships around here will give you the Carfax on their website for free. If not that, they’ll give it to you as soon as you decide on a vehicle.
Any place that makes you shell out the dough for a Carfax membership, I would keep my distance.
My favourite used car dealer was the guy who kept talking to my husband, even though I was the one answering his questions. Hey, dude, the fifties called! They want your sexism back!
Good luck … people might want to be even more careful after what I saw on the news this winter. Car and truck pile ups, ice storms, mud slides, snow and ice means salt on the roads.
I bet a lot of people trade their cars in after the last snow storm for new ones. Detail shops have a way of being very very good.
I would think that even little old lady school teachers would lie to get rid of an old used car this year.
Not so much. This was the biggest dealer in Bremerton. The gave us something called AutoCheck. It didn’t give us accurate information. No service record.
I had a similar experience. Oh, the sales guy did tell me about colors and vanity mirrors, even tho I was asking about safety and fuel economy. Needless to say, we didn’t buy from him.
Yes, that too. My husband finally said to him, “She did the research and she IQ is way higher than mine or yours, so, please speak to her.”
It made for an silent test drive in another truck he tried to sellus.
Carfax and AutoCheck are just tools that may offer you partial information about your vehicle. If you have one run and find some information about the car it may be useful. If something has been reported then it maybe on the report. BUT, a clean report does not mean one damn thing. The car could still be a wreck. To say these reports are incomplete would be charitable.
Too many people seem to believe that everything accident or repair is reported, and that all of this information will show up on the report you pay for. It is simply not the case. Random article, you can find as many as you like.
I am a member on a car nut message board that has about even internet ranking with the SDMB, and one of the few things that will get you banned there is to keep asking for a Carfax.
These reports are not useless, but just about. They may tell you about previous owners and the mileage when the title and registration were transferred, this information is publicly available from state DVMs. If it was totaled you should be able to see that it has a salvage title.
Where do the service records come from? Do the dealers report them to Carfax? Does Carfax pay for this info? What about work at a private auto repair business, how is that found out? People who work in the auto repair and dealership business, like Rick or **GaryT **might know.
If you run one of these type reports you are getting maybe some information that may be useful. But it may be only part of the story. And a clean report only tells you that no reported information was found, not that there isn’t any.
I bought used cars for my daughters when they turned 16.
I found a coworker that was selling his one owner car. I bought the other car from a close family friend. I test drove them and my mechanic looked over the coworker’s car before I bought it. The mechanic had serviced the other car and knew it was fine.
There’s always a risk buying a used car. My biggest concern was getting a one owner car that had a known service history.
A few years back my elderly father purchased a used car from a dealership which was part of a mid sized regional chain. He was just being stupid and stubborn, he was in the early stages of dementia but still had every legal right to spend his own money to buy a car. Well, they screwed him good, with financing included he was going to pay more for a four year old car than it’s original MSRP. Oh, and they even got him to agree to have any dispute with the dealership settled through arbitration and not the courts.
The day after he brought it home my mother and I took him back to the dealership and asked as nicely as we could if they would just undo the sale but no, they wouldn’t. As we were walking out I told the sales manager that I hopped no one ever abused one of his parents the way he was helping to abuse mine.
The only “ace in the hole” we had was that the man who owned the chain of dealerships had recently announced that he was considering a run for senate and just like my father, was a life long republican. My brother, myself and a few friends collaborated on a very carefully worded email to the owner saying, among other things that my father could be at the disposal of any of his primary election rivals and would not be adverse to any media interviews.
Give the man credit, explained to him like that and he saw the light. The car was returned to the dealer with about 10 more miles on it than it left the lot with and the little paper floor mats were still in place. And my father got his money back.
Well, we got a truck. A 2008 F-150 with 82K miles. The dealer was pretty transparent in the deal. We took it to our mechanic and it checked out fine.
Hubby loves it. Happy Birthday to him
Why? On the average, women are more conservative and do more research before a major purchase. They are a harder sell.
My last car purchase, the sales man provided only three of four pages of the CarFax, because the fourth was just a formatting artifact. I still made him fish it out of the trash.
I took my car into the dealer last summer because it failed state inspection, and the inspector told me there was no way such a part should have failed on a year-old car and it should be covered under the warranty.
The dealer claimed I’d probably caused it by driving with the parking brake on (I have never once set the parking brake the entire time I’ve owned the car, so not a likely scenario) then tried to charge me $1100 for a brake job on the rear wheels. I don’t know shit about cars, but that sounded very high to me, and I expressed reluctance. Then they offered to do a lesser job for $600 to get me through inspection. I said no thanks and left. Took it to my parents’ independent mechanic, who did most everything under their original $1100 quote (minus one brake shoe which he said didn’t need replacing) for $260. The car sailed through reinspection.
I was a very young-looking woman arriving alone at the dealership. I really wonder how it might have gone if I’d brought my dad with me, but I guess that will remain a mystery because I’m never going back.
About 15 years ago or so, back when the whole “look stuff up on the internet” thing was much more novel, I was midway through negotiations on a used vehicle, when checking multiple sources, it became apparent that the odometer had been rolled back. Not tons, but probably around 10-20k, and it had been done quite recently, almost assuredly by that very dealership. The gig was up. It was damned obvious. The salesguy was actually blushing.
No accusations were made, but the facts were noted, and the next offer they received was about half what they’d originally asked for. They took it, no beating around the bush.
Shops voluntarily report them. Many (most?) dealer service departments are on board with them, but it’s way less common with independent shops. CarFax has some perks they try to give shops to report for them, like a service that’ll autopopulate VIN’s from a plate number, but I think most independents still think it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
Originally, they only wanted the service records because it would provide a trajectory of dates and odometer readings that would make any rollbacks obvious, but as of late CarFax has been trying to imply that you should rely on their reports to see the service history of the car, which is complete and utter bullshit. Even the rollback reports should be taken with a grain of salt too-- since they are just self reported and the system is completely automated, all it takes is a couple of transposed digits by a dyslexic service writer to set off the rollback warnings.
I’d put my money on a mis-entered odometer reading, or maybe a replaced instrument cluster they didn’t bother to correct. Why would you bother going through the trouble (not to mention the legal risk) to only roll it back enough to put a few hundred bucks back on the value of the car?
You’re under the wrong assumption about the benefit of rolling an odometer back.
Odometers aren’t rolled back to add value to the car; they’re rolled back simply to SELL the car. Odometer readings are one thing that a LOT of people use as an arbitrary Buy/Don’t Buy marker. If a car looks good but has a high mileage, a buyer might pass; whereas if an auto has low mileage, buyers believe there’s less of a chance that it was driven hard.
*Unrelated, but the same thing applies to kitchen upgrades. Many people falsely believe a kitchen remodel will increase the value of the house when selling it. The reality is that it adds very little to the house and its real value is that “remodeled kitchen” gets buyers in to see the house.
