Yeah, same here.  If you can get the car quick enough, you can get the VIN from a car that isn’t listed as Totaled and make it look like the car never had an accident.  Well, until someone notices the back end was a different color originally than the front.   Ask me how I know.

“Some of them are cars abandoned by their customers when repairs got too expensive.”

Listen here buddy! you’re right, with a few exceptions. As a mechanic of 20+ years now (I’m getting old!) If it’s a project car or a high mileage car and it just needs a few things to be finished and a mechanic is selling it? Walk away. Unless A) they’re going through something like a divorce or B) they’ve recently…

I have the exact opposite problem. I don’t like people who insist on meeting at a public place.  An honest seller has no problem meeting you at their home. If they refuse to let me come to their home that tells me they want to get away with something and they don’t want me to come back and knock on their door.

Yeah, I went to a guy’s house and his garage was immaculate with every tool precisely placed on a pegboard and well-organized and he had to take the car cover off of the already-garaged car to show it to me. I bought that car on the spot and drove it for 7 years without it ever needing anything other than consumables:…

From some amount of professional experience, I might be wary of an ex-rental Camaro or Mustang (or basically anything Mopar with a V8), but yes, your typical Camcordima is probably being driven by a business traveler who doesn’t want to make a career limiting move like writing off a rental car, and has driven so many…

Around here, people trying to sell their cars, whether they are guy trying to sell his hooptie or someone who does it for a living, always wipe down the engine with armor all. I hate that!

Fun story. I once wrote software for a now-defunct (got shut down by the Feds for fraud) Kia dealership. Since their website vendor (Dealer.com, I believe) didn’t grant API access, my software scraped their website and pre-composed Craigslist ads for their used cars. One of the things the software did was just drop…

I mean that’s pretty much your fault. Why didn’t you just stop growing at a normal size? I stopped at just over 6 foot. Could have kept going, but decided not to.

I think that’s only true for people who buy the full insurance coverage. I generally rely on the coverage provided by my credit card and my own insurance policy, with all the deductibles that apply there. Since I don’t want to pay for a little ding or scratch that wasn’t on the car when I rented it, I am especially…

Show and tell. If your listings have lots of pictures and details, if you’re open about the history, and knowledgeable about features, pros, and cons, I’m interested.

For me, the amount of stuff you can show/tell me beforehand is directly proportional to the distance I’m willing to go to make the deal. Which is why my…

I feel personally attacked, haha. I do a quick cleaning of the engine plastics whenever I wash the car twice a month to keep the plastics and hoses in shape.

you bargain out paint protection, vehicle theft and the like.

Y’all got any more of that 0% financing from the early pandemic?

Correct I have seen pricing of premium sedan 3 years old around 25-30k miles to decrease pricing quite a bit in the last month and half or so.

Just to let you know.... a few weeks ago I purchased a 2022 Chrysler 300 with all options for $9,000 below sticker... Of course, the dealer wanted to charge me for a bunch of “dealer-add ons” (paint protection, wheel locks, recovery, window tint and maybe more) for about $2,900 but I agreed to $500 for all the…

Dealer inventories are automated, once they get put into their allocation, they get shown on the site the next day. If you want to decode it a bit, just look at the images. If they are stock photos, they most likely aren’t on the lot. If they are real images they are there. 

Ha, yeah, I remember shopping for one right before COVID hit and was quoted $25-$27k OTD for new top trim Renegades that had MSRPs in the low $32-34k.

So...

It will probably take that long for most 1-3 year-old vehicles to make much sense. My house will likely be up to 7 people by next year, so I’ve been regularly perusing the van/suv listing and it’s very rare I see a lightly used car for much less than $1-2k below the cost of new. The good used vehicles tend to be the…