Times are tight, and a car is, for many people stuck in suburbia, a necessity.

Just because it’s a necessity doesn’t mean you should leap right into buying a car that you’ve found for sale.

Here are some tips for signs to back away slowly before signing that purchase agreement.

Missing Records
If the seller doesn’t have a service history, you’re taking a big risk. Every major auto shop is computerized; chances that a car made in the last two decades has been serviced without a trace are virtually nil. If you can’t document when it was last serviced, odds are it hasn’t.

Creative Maintenance
If a car has mismatched tires, or looks like something that came out of Dr. Frankenstein’s Mad Garage, it’s probably got problems. In particular, check out the paint job. If the paint job looks like it came from the Home Depot, it’s time to back away nice and easy.

Other key signs are cars in lots so covered in oil and transmission fluid that you can’t tell if any of them are leaking, and anything that has stashes of nuts in it from something out of a Disney cartoon. All of these are signs of long term abandonment.

Prior Ownership by Miscreants
Rental companies turn cars over to used car lots when they run out of warranty coverage, and can’t be maintained readily. Which is a euphemism for "Was driven until the axles bent, and was abused by everyone who rented it." Given the incentives to unplug odometers to avoid rental car mileage charges, you can’t even take a guess on the actual mileage. Similar abuses happen to cars owned by teenagers and turned into street racers.

This isn’t to say there aren’t good deals out there in used cars, but you should always take the time to do your homework, and to look into the issues of getting a new warranty on a used car.

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Filed under: Buying a Car, Used Car Warranty

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