Carfax?

elle, with respect, neither are going to be anywhere /near/ as useful as a proper physical inspection. you know a little bit more about engine inspection now than you did before. with the honda d-series engine, you can see if there's sludge/resin and you can see the cam lobes to inspect for wear. this is a good indicator of condition in the rest of the engine.

Hi Jim. The purpose to me of these title check services is to offer some evidence for whether the car either (1) is a salvage vehicle (if it is, this is a car property insurance problem, for one); (2) has had more owners than the seller is claiming; or (3) has had the odometer tampered with. Carfaxdotcom and autocheckdotcom from my reading are not perfect, but to me they give more peace of mind. The physical car inspection is as important, absolutely. If I am not pleased with either the title check or the physical inspection, then I reject a used car. Believe me, my physical inspection checklist derives largely from reading here over the years. I am looking at 7th generation ( =3D

2001-2005) Civics with around 100k miles or less on them and documents to support length of ownership and maintenance, too.

I wouldn't put much stock in carfax helping with number 2 on your list. I have seen the carfax for a couple of vehicles I bought new with less than 20 miles on the odometer and it aready showed 3 owners. The explanation from the dealer was that transfers between dealers were recorded. If this is happening already with a brand new car that has never actually been sold to a consumer, I can't imagine what will show up on one that has been traded in and resold a couple of times.

But then, the number of owners is really irrelevant. Its the maintenance and accident history you are more interested in.

and even that doesn't mean anything much. those sources only show you what has been recorded, not unrecorded. i've seen "clean title" vehicles that are clearly rebuilt serious accident victims. i've seen "salvage" vehicles in perfect condition [i own one]. and i've had 300k mile vehicles in better condition than 100k. the only reliable method of determining quality is inspection. end of story.

right

pass your

I am just a rank amateur car buyer but IMHO I disagree with

**not** using carfax.

Sure if an experienced con/shyster wants to shyster someone, then someone will likely be shystered.

And there are many car's that may not show all their histories on carfax but i doubt the number is significant compared to all the car's problems that will appear.

I subscribed to carfax a few years ago for the intentional purpose of checking/buying a used car. One car that was on a large dealer's used lot was less than 1 yr old. When I inquired about why such a new car was on the used lot the reason given was that the customer/owner traded up.

Well... car fax showed that the car was involved in an extensive front end collision about 3 months after it was purchased and it had bounced across 5 different *used* dealer lots before ending up at this dealer's used lot. That was one car and salesperson i needed to avoid. It only took minutes to get that info.

and there are many more stories like that one, than a story like this, (fake story follows --->) "a friend bought a car and it was in 3 wrecks and was totaled out as a salvage because it was submerged in the great flood of New Orleans and carfax showed the car had only one owner and had never been in an accident, carfax sux" (

CFX is not a credible sole source of positive info, but is hard to ignore as a potential red flag.

if you don't inspect, or take the vehicle to someone competent to inspect, you'd never know that - you're just guessing.

you found one with a record. you didn't find one with the same history /without/ a record.

you're spending a thousands of dollars, and the safety of your self and family is at stake - so you want to save a few minutes??? that's a joke, right?

again, that's bogus. inspection time is /less/ with the damaged car than the real deal. once it's shown to be dud, the inspection is over!

you don't work for walletfax do you?

even that is not very reliable. a 5-year old car has significantly depreciated, and a cosmetic fender bender will cause it to be written off. and yet you can get a structural rebuild done by [drunken] monkeys on a 3-month old car with no history.

spend the money having aaa physically inspect for you. /wayyy/ more reliable.

Carfax is one test of many. It can turn up problems, but NEVER count on it to do so. IOW, assume that a car they say is bad is indeed bad, but don't assume that one they say is 'clean' is clean.

Up here in Canada, we have a show called Marketplace. They did a story on Carfax and showed how inadequate it is.

I concur with the other posters that suggest a physical inspection is the only way to go.

Both are the way to go. Learning wether a car was used as a rental car or totaled in an accident can be invaluable information.

nope. rental cars can be abused, or they can be well maintained. "totaled" can be physically utterly trivial depending on what the insurance company deemed value to be at the time. relying on anything other than physical inspection is an exercise in self-deception and gullibility to advertising..

It is still useful information. Would you want a car that passed inspection with a glowing report that had been totaled previously?

I do both.

Depends on the price & physical condition of the car. I have owned cars that were previously declared totalled & gotten many years & many miles of good service out of them. But then, I don't even trust paying a mechanic to do a mechanical inspection before I buy a car. I do it myself. If there is anything seriously wrong with a car, its usually pretty obvious once you start looking closely at it.

I agree with robb, Leftie and you. To share experience for the archives, about a year ago when I was looking at Craig's List cars, the Carfax report showed that about one-third had had odometer tampering. Many also had a salvage title. This information was not being disclosed by the sellers. Also, a salvage title is important not because it is a clue to look for damage, a non-straight frame, etc. A salvage title is important because it means the car will not be fully insurable for damage to it in the future, regardless of the extent of repairs to the car in the past, because some insurance company somewhere has already paid out on the car for its full value.

I agree it won't be fully insurable. If you are going to buy a salvage car, its not really a viable idea unless its priced such that you would never consider putting collision coverage on it. You shouldn't need a salvage title to tell you to look for damage though. That's part of your inspection, CarFax or not. My feeling is if somebody wants to give me the Carfax free to look at, I'll look, but its not on my list of things I would spend money on.

I also agree with you as far as what you find on craigslist & in the local paper car section. The last couple of times I looked at cars that way, all I found was sleazy guys set up in vacant apartments with cars that appeared to have been used as outhouses, essentially unlicensed used car lots. The only places I've seen consistently nice used cars around here (Dallas) the past several years has been in new car dealers' used car lots & even then it is still caveat emptor at a lot of them.

buying a

'odometer

an

really

problem...

I thought the only thing you can trust %100 are ... death and taxes ?

Just to counterpoint a bit, a friend just backed out of buying a

2002 Camry with very low mileage, because Carfax showed an 'odometer discrepancy'. It appears now that there was none. Most likely an inspection station wrote down the wrong number. So heck, you really can't even trust them 100% when they appear to find a problem...

unless your carfax report states the nature of the damage, you have no idea what "totaled" means other than that the insurance company considered it "uneconomic to repair". it doesn't mean squat in terms of structural integrity. oh, and vehicles are are repaired, but don't have any record on carfax, can be chop-shop repairs - i.e. uber dangerous.

you should only spend you money on the one that matters - physical inspection.

friend had their teenage daughter joyride their new lexus over an embankment. the vehicle was inspected, repaired, and given a clean bill of health. but it didn't drive right. after getting the brush off from the insurance company several times, he submitted a report from an independent inspector revealing the problem - irrepairably bucked subframe. insurance company wrote off the vehicle and paid for a new one.

without that insistent and pedantic owner, inspection and subsequent write-off, there would have been no carfax, and you could have been driving that vehicle right now.