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19th
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You should be. That's why we've put together this massive Used Car Buying Guide.
The stories we hear every other day about people getting “screwed” are disconcerting and quite frankly, frightening.
In my time as a consumer counselor at the Automobile Protection Association (APA), I heard stories that would make even the manliest of man's skin crawl. How about having your credit card taken from you along with the keys to your old trade-in car, then being told to leave the premises with the “new” used car when it won't start?
Recently, a colleague of mine came across a private ad promoting a service on a very popular website to erase trouble codes from your car. The text in the ad states that having the codes and subsequent lights erased for the instrument cluster will help increase the resale value of your car.
I also recall stories from my days at the APA where a well-known dealer had a huge shop full of people paid to roll back odometers.
Put the two together, and as a consumer, you could be purchasing something that on the surface has 80,000 km and is trouble-free when in fact you'll have bought a 150,000-km car packed with malfunctioning systems. The catch is that you'll have paid the same price...
We at Auto123 have put together a ginormous Used Car Buying Guide to help you with the process. Tips and advice are always so tedious, time consuming and feel like work to go through: I know, I'm not one to read user manuals either.
In the case of a used car purchase, it's a one-in-four-or-so-year type of deal. I think we should all sit and read through the guide, make some notes, learn a few things, and do everything we can to avoid serious and very costly situations.
The stories we hear every other day about people getting “screwed” are disconcerting and quite frankly, frightening.
In my time as a consumer counselor at the Automobile Protection Association (APA), I heard stories that would make even the manliest of man's skin crawl. How about having your credit card taken from you along with the keys to your old trade-in car, then being told to leave the premises with the “new” used car when it won't start?
Recently, a colleague of mine came across a private ad promoting a service on a very popular website to erase trouble codes from your car. The text in the ad states that having the codes and subsequent lights erased for the instrument cluster will help increase the resale value of your car.
I also recall stories from my days at the APA where a well-known dealer had a huge shop full of people paid to roll back odometers.
Put the two together, and as a consumer, you could be purchasing something that on the surface has 80,000 km and is trouble-free when in fact you'll have bought a 150,000-km car packed with malfunctioning systems. The catch is that you'll have paid the same price...
We at Auto123 have put together a ginormous Used Car Buying Guide to help you with the process. Tips and advice are always so tedious, time consuming and feel like work to go through: I know, I'm not one to read user manuals either.
In the case of a used car purchase, it's a one-in-four-or-so-year type of deal. I think we should all sit and read through the guide, make some notes, learn a few things, and do everything we can to avoid serious and very costly situations.
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| Photo: Sébastien D'Amour |