When buying a used car, always get a prepurchase inspection

by lacroix_connoisseur

 

For the last few years I’ve been driving a 2009 Nissan Versa hatchback. It’s been a great little car, but it was old and starting to fall apart, and then I found that it was burning oil at an alarming rate. So for the past month or so I’ve been hunting around to see what I can find.

I found a 2014 Ford Focus SE hatchback that had all the options I would get had I bought it new; leather interior, fog lamps, sport package (you get rear disc brakes with this, very important) and a manual transmission. Focus’ are super good deals right now IF you get the manual, because the automatic transmissions were absolute garbage and brought down the value of the car across the board, but the rest of the car is well made.

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The car was advertised around $7500 with around 71k miles, both KBB and Edmunds valued the car around $8k if it was in “excellent” condition. So I put a deposit down on the car on the condition I could get a prepurchase inspection. On a car this old with this many miles, I didn’t expect anything too crazy, and from the outside it looked and drove fine.

Well guess what, it needs about $1100 of suspension work! I go back to the dealer and say “I want to buy this car today, and I’m fine with the price it’s at, but not the work it needs. To sell me this car, you can either a) fix what needs to be fixed or b) knock $1100 of the price and I’ll have it fixed.”

Well they decided to knock the price of the repairs off the price, and I drove off in my car. ALWAYS get a prepurchase inspection on used cars, no matter how nice they look or good they drive!

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