rev up your engines today I'm going to answer the question, should you buy a car from
CarGurus, now CarGurus is a Cambridge Massachusetts based company that does
research to find where you can buy a car, they have algorithms that compare the
prices the dealers when you're looking for a car gives you what's called an
instant market value of what you're looking for, then compares them all over the
place, now the company itself CarGurus gets
paid fifteen dollars by a car lot dealership whether they buy it or not is
immaterial, they get their 15 bucks if they can swerve you to go to them, they
get their 15 bucks just because you looked it up on their
site and then you contacted a particular dealer, so they're making a 15 dollar
profit even if anything's not bought, and let's say you're not a car dealer well
for non car dealers car gurus will let you list the car for free, but if it's
sold, the seller of the car pays car guru $99 for the service, now CarGurus
themselves says nobody pays them to put it in a particular order like one
company's paying them more money to be the top of the list, they say it's based
on the price and what you're looking for in your area, last time I checked they
had more than three million used cars for sale and over four hundred and fifty
thousand new cars listed on CarGurus, now CarGurus was founded in 2006 by mr.
Steiner he was one of the cofounders of TripAdvisor, you got something like
TripAdvisor you're only gonna stay in a place for a few days maybe a week or
something if things aren't perfect well it's not gonna end the world, but if you
using a system like that to buy a car that you're gonna be driving for years
sight on scene, I'd be kind of leery about that myself, now locally here
in Houston a big city they're advertising the heck on them, I see their
ads all over the place, so obviously they're putting a lot of money in this
thing so they are making money to pay for all these advertisements, now
in the year 2017 CarGurus went from being a public company, to being traded on the
stock market, and as of today at least it's got a 3.95 billion
dollar market camp so it's a large corporation, and as with any large
corporation a lot of times they get away from the original idea. and they start
thinking how can we make a profit.
and then often there's very little
correlation between what they're trying to get you to buy and whether it's any
good or not.
now theoretically the listings are fair nobody's paying to be
at the top of the list.
say it's a car dealership they say that well if the
dealerships get good ratings then they go higher up on the list, and if you know
anything about ratings on the internet those things can be faked so easily
you got Amazon there's a new product you see all these great ratings, and then you
look and almost all written the same and often in bad English, then you know hey
there's a Chinese company out there that's trying to sell this stuff, I
checked those things out over the years and found that quite a few of them, which
I actually tested out myself are garbage products, and then later they
weren't even be sold on Amazon because they checked and found out real people
ended up saying, hey these are horrible products and so they went off the list
I don't trust ratings on the Internet one iota, they're probably listed
mainly by the price, they have no idea what kind of shape these cars are
in so, if a guy's got a later model car it'll probably make it higher on their
list maybe the car was wrecked flooded stolen who knows, you don't have any idea
about that, and CarGurus can even allow financing themselves because of course
as I said they're a huge corporation, they see hey they want to get in the
financing game, cuz there's so much profit out of that stuff, you got a
hundred thousand dollars CD and you're making like half a percent interest
these guys are out there with these used cars their interest rates are sky high
they're making a fortune if they're loaning you money, now the way it's set up
is kind of squirrely too, because let's say
you pick a car you want, your allowed to give your email or phone number to
CarGurus who contacts the dealer, a lot of people have said hey the dealer never
contacted me back, now of course car guru doesn't want to show you exactly where
it is because then you could say well the heck with them I'll just go
to the dealer myself and buy it, then they don't get their dollars for sending
you over there, so it's all done on the Internet well we all know things can
screw up on that all the time, lots of people including some of my customers
who were gonna try it, when they went to the dealer they were told that, oh that one's
already been sold here's something else we got for sale, the used car business is
kind of dirty everybody who's ever been involved in it knows that, they've always
got lost leaders they're trying to get you in, they'll say well we only had one at
that price, but here's some more here and they're just doing it to get you to come
in thinking that they'll be able to sell you something now that they got you in
person, cuz I've always said you can often get the best deal from private
individuals, there are some private individuals on car guru, but mainly it's
car dealers it's rare that you're ever gonna get a good deal from a car dealer
they're pros, if they buy a car for 3 grand they want to sell it for 6 or 9
grand, and to top it off there's certain fees and stuff that aren't included in the
price, both car guru and the dealers do not have to stand by that
original price they've got disclaimers all over the place their a corporation, but
they say any price does not have to be honored my car gurus or the dealership,
they're covering their own backs on that, so
if you go there and the price is different, or they don't have that car, you
can't sue them or anything, their a corporation you know, you need a
lawyer to read through half of those contracts, and these extra fees can go as
high as $1,300, their not telling you that stuff until it's too late
and when it comes to the title the car, hey you buy a car you want the title in
hand I've done some research and a lot of people and complain that they bought
a car from them took them forever to get the title, some of them haven't even
gotten it yet, you deal with a giant bureaucratic corporation like CarGurus
or 3.9 billion dollar valuation things are gonna mess up
that's just how it goes in today's world, like I always said if you're buying a
used car you want to see the title in hand, because you want to flip it over
and if it says reconditioned or salvage title, you really don't want to buy the thing
if you don't have that information in hand me I wouldn't touch a car, all a
seller has to do to put it on CarGurus is have the car year the vehicle
identification number, transmission, type the color, and a photo
and photos often lie you can Photoshop, or even more obvious
let's say the back of the car smashed in take a picture in front of the car or in
the case of something that happened to me, once I got a truck from an auction
site, it's a Toyota truck I figured it would be a great truck no problems, and
they show the top of it and it looked clean and the paint
was good, when I got under that truck the frame was all rotting away,
they of course didn't show a picture of that on the side, they showed where the
paint was shinning and everything, buying a
car without seeing it and road testing it is just plain dumb, so as far as I'm
concerned it's a gigantic corporation that spends a fortune advertising what a
great job they do, what do they know about the cars are listing on their site
hundreds of thousands of them three million used cars and four hundred and
fifty thousand new cars the last time I checked, basically you got this giant
corporation that's bird-dogging for people who are selling used cars they
are a go between, they really don't know that much about your car that's being
sold, me I'd stay far away from things like that, they got them listed from best
ones to worst, but how are they saying which one is best they really don't know
anything about these cars, they're going by hearsay of what, oh who rated this
company or who rated this better or not, who's to say that people that work at
those companies aren't just typing in things saying, oh yeah this deal is great
Oh fantastic, I know a guy that ran a shop and that's what
he did was the mechanics who weren't working, they'd go on social media and he'd have his
mechanics when they weren't busy typing around saying how great his garage was
so me I wouldn't waste my time with CarGurus if I was looking for a car
there's just too many ifs, they just make it look convenient, come on now buying
used cars it's a lot more complex than that, if you want to do it right, so if
you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos, remember to ring
that Bell