Quote:
Originally Posted by JSH
The problem with buying a vehicle from a private party is that there aren't very many available today - at least if you are looking for a late-model vehicle that is 3-5 years old. The VAST majority of those cars are lease returns or a trade-in from someone that buys a new car every few years.
You can find old used cars for sale but I have zero confidence the owner will have records to show me the maintenance has been done. Someone that is going to go through the hassle of selling a car themselves is also someone that is likely to do their own maintenance - or skip the maintenance. Someone like Redpoint  |
Quite a few Russians selling used cars on the side, often times with reconstructed titles, though I haven't looked at the used car market in about 5 years. I was seriously close to getting a used Bolt in 2020, but that was dominated by used EV dealerships that sprang up from law that gives people money for purchasing a used EV. Still no idea what the point of that law was other than to soak up the California used EV inventory.
I had difficulty finding my Acura on the private market because so few were built with a manual transmission. Really had no intention of buying the one I found at the dealership, but they sold it to me within a couple hundred bucks of the private party price. Nobody in Portland wanted a manual.
As far as maintenance, I change the oil once a year if the vehicle needs it or not. At that time, I knock the dirt out of the air filter. I rotate tires as needed and check the brakes at that time. Every decade I change all the fluids.
You can tell if a person is a dirtbag or not. If you go to look at the car and there's piles of McDonalds trash in it, you can tell the car was neglected.
The thing is, the stealership isn't going to have any more info about how a car was maintained than the original owner. When I bought my Acura I asked for maintenance records, and they said they didn't get any from the original owner and they had no records of the vehicle being serviced there. So the value the dealer added over a private party sale was they paid someone minimum wage to spend 15 minutes soaking absolutely every interior surface in ArmorAll so it looked shiny again. That's worth thousands over private party.