All those looking to buy beater cars , from my personal experience, it can be quite a challenge. To begin with , not many dealers are interested in dealing at the lower end of the spectrum. Larger dealers may have them in their inventory, but only because they were traded in for new(er) vehicles from their lineup.
I couldnt stretch myself much to go for a price bracket beyond $5k, because of various reasons like a) I just landed here. b) I work for a small desi IT services company , and you know what all that entails.
Coming back to the car hunt. I started off by with a rigid criteria in my head of what I wanted from a car, viz., low miles, no immediate repairs, hassle free and easy to sell off without much of an economic hit. And yes, in the price bracket I mentioned above.
To begin with I started going through autotrader/cars.com/various other portals and quickly discovered that there wasnt much on offer there which fit my requirements. Craigslist was next, but visiting individual sellers when you dont have a car of your own is a pain. Still noted down a few numbers/addresses of dealers who list on craigslist and not on bigger portals and started visiting them one by one.
The thing to note here is, most of these tier-2 dealers get their inventory not from trade-ins , but from auto auctions. Apparently, these are closed door auctions (where only dealers are permitted) and hundreds of vehicles from fleets, or from financial institutions are auctioned off. A larger dealer might also get rid of cars that are sitting on his lot and unable to find a buyer , through auctions.
I paid a visit to a number of such dealers , from the fancy looking ones, to small, ones, to downright shady ones. Took many test drives , inspected many cars , but simply couldnt find a car which was worth the price being asked. Cars at dealerships run by Russian(quite a few of them in this business!) / Arab / Mexican folk tended to be priced okay-ish. But these places are likely to be located in far flung corners, with hand painted signs and lots with barb-wire compounds. A big chunk tended to be cars with rebuilt titles, so that was a point to be noted. Most of them would give you a carfax report if you asked for it, and some of them would allow third party inspections too, provided you leave some kind of security deposit with them.
The thing is, they tend to be reasonably priced
because the cars were in iffy condition. You can make that sub-iffy condition too in many cases.
Undeterred, I did take many test drives, only to find something or the other feeling very wrong to my senses in almost all of them.
Did I tell you that prices quoted and KBB values were vastly off ? One Honda dealer in downtown even told me KBB is just a number and he isnt selling to KBB.
By now my patience was wearing thin, and I was rather desperate to close a deal on something. Then I came across a website called areacars.com , which lists these tier-2/3 places. A bit of exploring later found a place run by a mom-son duo , who claimed to not pick cars up from auction, but handpick them from individual sellers or franchise dealerships. Umm, yeah, right. But the limited number of cars on his dealership did look clean. He was also offering a 3000 mile/90 day engine-transmission warranty on each sale.
I checked out a couple of cars, and finally zeroed in on a 2002 Corolla LE. Clean inside out and new(ish) looking tires too. Everything on it worked and it made no untoward squeaks or noises. It had 100,030 miles on it. The TD was okay too, except the fact that I found the brakes to be a bit weak. A bit of haggling back and forth , and I got it for $5400 out of the door (on road price, for noobs like me).
Here is a cellphone pic :
A month and 800 miles later, I find a few issues with it.
- The brakes continue to get weaker. Its like stepping on a sponge now. This particular car does not have ABS.
- Vibrations creep in above 70mph. I hope its not serious. The tires are in okay condition. Above 80 they tend to reduce.
- The fuel needle and the transmission backlight (indicating which gear you are in) stays on even after I remove the key. The needle is accurate though.
- It is sloooow. Off the line that is. If I am not mashing my foot down off signals (and I dont) , even Fed-Ex delivery vans are much faster. Once it gets into its stride beyond 2nd gear, progress is relatively brisk.
- Its doing about 33 miles to the gallon. Its good that I dont have to fill it up as often as I used to fill up my rental dodge avenger which I had after landing here.
- Corollas of this generation are known to drink oil, as I read later. I hope I dont suffer from this.
Sorry for the long noob post , but I had to get it out of my system.