rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about how not to get ripped off when buying
a used car from Craigslist, now I know quite a bit about buying used cars every
car I've ever bought in my entire life has been a used car and over the years I've
checked out hundreds of used cars for my customers when they were thinking
about buying a used car but they wanted a mechanic to check it out so I checked
it out for them, now nothing beats buying a good used car, in my own case I'll often
pay twenty to thirty percent of the original price of the car and the car
still might have eighty percent of it's life left, for example I bought this
lexus it had sixty thousand miles on it i paid $4,000 originally it was over
$30,000 but being a Lexus with 60,000 miles, it's still got at least eighty
percent of its life left and I sure paid a lot less than eighty percent of the
price of the car, the only problem with buying used cars you got to find
somewhere to buy it and a lot of people use Craigslist which actually isn't a
bad place to look for a used car because if you go to use car dealers hey I got
friends that are in the business, let me tell you, when they're selling you a used car
the price that they want you to pay is anywhere two to three or five times what
they paid for that car, that's why you see so many used-car Lots around it's an
extremely profitable business just like pizza, doesn't cost that much to make a
pizza that's why they can sell them cheaper, the materials to make a pizza
are generally less than a buck, so as you can find a private individual that's selling
a car like on Craigslist, it's not a bad place to look for a used car but there's
a lot of dishonesty in the world so let's say you're looking at a car on
craigslist you go and you're looking at the car, the first thing you want to find
out is the person that's selling you that car the actual owner of the car
because many disreputable car Lots will have people who work for them directly
or indirectly, they'll put a Craigslist ad you'll go and they'll try to sell you
the car it's actually a car lot car that they've driven to meet you somewhere and
they don't actually own the car, it's the old bait-and-switch now realize
first thing you want to ask them is who owns the car is
title in your name and if the title isn't in their name or if it's a
salvaged or refurbished title, don't buy it, now and I was young they just called
them Salvage titles because I meant the car was Salvage then it was resold but
they tried to make it look sneaky so they put things like refurbished on it
which really doesn't mean anything it doesn't mean that it was refurbished and
then someone checked it to make sure it was done right, it just means the cars
been totaled by an insurance company and then you're buying it back and trying to
put it back on the road, you want to stay away from those type of cars and be very
leery of where you meet people on a Craigslist deal now it's not just for
your own safety, like you don't want to go and uh you know dark room of some
seedy bar to meet somebody, but you don't even want to say, oh I'll meet you at
Waffle House parking lot or something like that, what you want to do is you
want to meet the person who's selling a car where they live and you know, hey you
got a little bit of recourse they live there, you're buying a car from them
because there are laws about pre-existing conditions on used cars
regardless of what the people might say, I had a customer do that once they were
gonna buy a used Mercedes and it was like twelve thousand dollars and they were meeting in the
Sears parking lot and I said are you serious, you're gonna meet somebody you
never met, hand him all that money cash in a Sears parking lot for a car that
you don't know anything about, now he was smart he didn't give the money and he
convinced them to bring the car to me to check it out, I checked it out it was an
absolute pile of junk, the engine was coming apart but after I called him up
told him it was junky he called up the seller and then within about half an
hour they said, oh we took the car to the mercedes-benz dealer and they said
nothing was wrong with it, but of course they didn't do that you couldn't do it
in half an hour anyways and no Mercedes Benz dealer is ever gonna tell you
that there's nothing wrong with a car that you're bringing, they want to sell
you stuff, so of course if you're looking at a car on Craigslist and they won't let a
mechanic look at it, just walk away there's too many scams out there and
speaking of scams, bring a scan tool with you if you're looking at a car on
Craigslist, this Creader it costs twenty four bucks that's nothing a lot of times
guys will reset the codes when there's trouble, this will show you that that's
been done, you just plug to the data port, snaps right in, they're
fully automated then they set themselves up and they immediately show you
information you wanna know, DTC is detect the trouble codes it says there's
none, now they could have erased them but if they did these readiness things would
not be ready but in this case as you can see it's ready, the thing you're really
looking at here is readiness in complete, readiness and complete is zero that means
it's complete if there are any numbers here that would mean that they reset it
and it's not ready yet because there's a trouble code somewhere that will pop
up later, that's the biggest trick in the book, they can erase the code then you
don't see the check engine light being on, but there's still a code that's
hidden in there when you put in this thing, if it says readiness and it
doesn't say zero on the complete that means that there are a certain number of
them that aren't completed and there's probably a problem in the car, don't buy
the car and then you want to have no trouble codes and you want to have all
the readiness done you don't want to have any that are incomplete, for 24
bucks this scanner or any little scanner that you can get that does
wireless communication with your cell phone, it will all be able to read trouble codes
and see if your systems are complete or incomplete, and that stops a lot of scams
in just a minute, now of course I got a whole book on checking out used cars but
you're gonna be doing some of those things yourself and some you'll probably
pay a mechanic the main thing is you want to take it for a good road test of
at least 10 minutes, back it up for a minute or so to see how it feels backing
up and how it breaks backing up, take it on the highway get it going at least 60
miles an hour to see how it goes on a highway, turn on the AC to make sure it
works, watch the temperature gauge to make sure it doesn't overheat, all the
normal things you're gonna do when you're road testing a car that you're thinking
about buying, now if you do decide to buy a car from Craigslist, here's another
bit of advice so you don't get ripped off, don't just be carrying cash around
with you, you tell the seller hey we're gonna meet at my bank then you're doing
a transaction in a very safe secure place and demand that they have the
title in their hand and if the title does not say Salvage or refurbished or
reconditioned and that it's got their name on it, not some other strange
person's name, because you can get a good deal on a car on Craigslist, but you
can't trust anyone, except me and the odds of you getting
me to check it out for you are gonna be pretty slim unless you live near Houston
Texas, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos,
remember to ring that Bell!