(Disclaimer: I am absolutely, positively going to get a thorough mechanical inspection of any used car I may happen to buy.)
Long story short – I am going to be buying a used car within the next two weeks. FWIW, it’s going to be a 2001-2005 4-door sedan, make is not important. Strongly gunning for a 6-cylinder, and for a car with < 60,000 miles. I’m doing my searching in the less-hurricane-affected areas of southeastern Lousiana (yup … right close to Katrina country). Leaving the area to search or paying for transit from another area are not really options.
OK … so I’ve bought CarFax’s 30 days of unlimited searches. I’ve been using it all day. I just want to know how easy it is for CarFax to miss crucial information. Is it fairly easy for titles to be laundered in ways that CarFax misses (don’t want to know how the laundering is done … just whether it’s something I have to obsess about on a clean-CarFax-report automobile)?
I already did find a car that had been wrecked without being disclosed by the dealer (did some hoofing it this past weekend). But I also saw in person many cars with rusty metal under the seats and behind the pedals. One guy told me he removed the seats and pressure-washed the carpets … that’s where the rust came from :dubious:
But CarFax didn’t turn up that the rusty cars were flooded. The cars in question show up as having been registered in other states. Perhaps they were visiting New Orleans during Katrina, and lost their cars? Perhaps their titles were just plain ol’ laundered? I don’t know.
If it makes a difference: I searched for this topic pretty compregensively. CarFax is mentioned in many general used car advice threads … but we’ve not had a thread dedicated to discussing CarFax itself.
I used it about 2 years ago to run 3 titles. It was for cars we already owned, but I did it mostly for kicks, and was sorely disapointed. We knew one vehicle had been in a major wreck and another had been in a few fenderbenders (these occurred while we owned them) but we wanted to see their previous history. CarFax pulled up nothing for all 3 titles and claimed they had not been in any wrecks.
When dealers offer a look at the CarFac report now, I don’t put much stock in it.
Carfax only reports info that is reported to them and that is from about 90% of the companies that offer car insurance in the US. It is very easy for a car to be totalled in an accident and for what ever reason, no insurance company is involved and the vehicle repaired by a back yard body shop. My insurance agent says he will not insure any car brought into this area that was previous licensed in Louisiana or Mississippi because of the sheer number of car damaged by the hurricane and flooding. A thorough inspection by a mechanic that can recognize repaired vehicles would be a much better option than relying on Carfax.
I purchased a used car from a non Toyota dealer (whom I’ll never go to again, but different story), didn’t use carfax, and only came to learn later through a Toyota dealer that the car had the engine replaced 3 times under warranty, and that the engine that was currently in the car had a VIN from another car. Apparently that engine was bought used to replace the last one that Toyota didn’t replace. For kicks I checked Carfax for any of this…absolutely nothing appeared.
A friend of mine bought a car off eBay a couple months ago and he got the 30 day unlimited searches.
We sat at the computer one night and ran every car I’d ever owned.
There was surprizing detail in some of them and I was amazed to find out that my '94 Saturn that I put 120,000 miles on in about 2 years never made it past the 140,000 mile mark. It showed that the car had 140,000 miles in late 1996 and in 2003 it was registered a few times in quick succession with only a few hundred more miles and then less than 20 or 30 between the next two. We figure the engine got blown and it was in storage and then a mechanic cashed in on the lien and registered it.
My '98 Mustang that I wrecked had had the entire front end replaced and the airbags had been blown. The repairs were done at a Ford dealer and none of that was reported to CarFax.
If the vehicle was registered in Texas at any point, the mileage and emissions report is shown with every annual emissions inspection.
One thing that I noticed is that any car that was ever registered in southern Louisiana or Mississippi had a standard disclaimer that the car had been registered in a flood zone. None of them had any specifics about that, but I don’t know for sure if any of my former cars were flooded during Katrina.
I have found a case where $11,000 worth of body damage was repaired at a major body shop and CarFax never had a clue. The driver’s insurance company paid for the repairs, but there was no police report (one-car incident, guy rolled his car).
You can never tell what threads would sink or swim around here. Not that I’m keeping score … just remembering so many multi-page used-car threads … figured this one would follow suit.
IIRC Carfax has a "buy-back"guarantee which says that if you find any of this damage and they didn’t report it, they’ll buy the car back from you.
I live in Mississippi and have run CarFax on all my vehicles, the ones I owned at the time (just for kicks and giggles) and the 3 used ones I’ve bought in the last 5 years. I’ve yet to be dissapointed … the CarFax was spot-on about my old Civic, which I’ve owned from new for 15 years and 200k miles. Buyer beware, I reckon.
bordelond, if you are considering buying a used car and are worried that it might been involved in one of the recent floods, the National Insurance Crime Bureau has a registry of flood-damaged cars. Might be a good additional check to CarFax.
FWIW, on an auto forum, I saw a guy post that he had been at a repo sale.
He pulled VINs from 10 vehicles.
Not one of those 10 showed up as a repo in Carfax.
