Why Not to Buy an Auction Car - YouTube

rev up your engines, today I'm going to tell you, why you shouldn't buy an auction car

now over the years, I've got a lot of customers say, Scotty I'm thinking about

buying an auction car, what do you think of that, well in my entire life I bought

one auction car, but I've had a bunch of customers that have bought auction cars

and most of the deals ended up badly, here's the reasons why, most auction cars

are at an auction for a reason, and it's not a good reason

many of them are wrecked, flooded, stolen, or repossessed cars by banks and

needless to say, those cars have not been taken care of very well and they may

have been totaled by an insurance company, now whenever you're buying a car

in this case it's my motorcycle, it will say on the title, the previous owner in this

case, it was Gulf Coast BMW even though it was a Triumph motorcycle, and it has

the mileage on it, so I know it's a real title, and that it's a clean title, if

it's been totaled it will either say salvage title, refurbish title, they have

lots of names for them, but they all mean that the car had a really big problem an

insurance company totaled it, or it was stolen and found, and now they're just

trying to sell a stupid thing, realized with the price of modern new cars being

sky-high, everybody's looking for a good used vehicle, so if there is a good used

vehicle out there people are able to sell it very easily because there's lots

of people looking for them, but in an auction, they're bought and they're sold

quickly, the people get whatever money they can get and it's gone, a good car

doesn't need to go to an auction because there's plenty of people waiting to buy

it, I'll give you my experience with buying an auction car, it was a Toyota pickup truck

and Toyota pickup trucks generally last forever so I

figured what the heck, I was getting it for my son, it was like 1500 bucks, so it

wasn't all that much money, but when they brought it in on a tow truck to my house

it did start, but it didn't even have a fan belt on the alternator, because the

alternator had rusted up solid and was locked on, and it didn't have power

steering either because that belt had fallen off, but the main problem

which you can see in this video, is that a lot of a-frame was completely rusted

away, but being a mechanic I went to a metal store and I bought this plate

steel, they cut me size as I wanted, then I welded it all together, now was a

gigantic job, and you're not going to be doing this kind of stuff yourself, and if

you paid someone to do it correctly you'd actually have to replace the whole

frame, which would cost thousands and thousands of thousands of dollars

granted this was an out-of-state auction, it was done on the Internet

so really all I saw was the pictures they took, and of course they didn't go

under it and take pictures to show that the frame was rotten away, but even if

you're at the actual auction in person, they just drive lost cars through

general you don't get much of a chance to check it out, you can't have a

mechanic road test it and then use the scan tools to see if anything's wrong, it

flies through, there it is and people start bidding on it, now I know

professional car dealers and they do buy cars at auctions, but they're pros and

sometimes they'll go to an auction and they might buy ten cars for twenty or

thirty thousand dollars total, so they're going to sell each one of those for

anywhere from six to twelve thousand dollars a piece, even if they get a bad

one or two or three, they're still making a healthy profit, and for professional

used car businesses, quite a few of the auctions give them a limited guarantee

whatever they payed for that car, say they paid $1,200 if they say, oh our mechanic

says there's too much money there's going to need to fix it up, they'll actually

give them the $1,200 credit back for buying another car at the next auction

but I have yet to see or hear about one that does it with private individuals

who go to a car auction, it's pretty much as is, buyer beware and have a big sticker

that says, as is no warranty, and perhaps the most hilarious story that never

happening to me was, a customer of mine went through water and it blew up the engine

in her Toyota Celica, so she sold it to a junkyard, well I get a phone call about

a month later from this guy who says, oh I got this Toyota Celica can i tow it

over and you can fix it, so he towed it over and lo and behold

it was my customers old Celica, and I knew it because I had taken the head off

the engine to see that the engine was destroyed, and I put it in a trunk and as

soon as I open the trunk, there was the head of the engine and I said, my customer got

rid of this car because it's worth nothing now, because the engine got blown up and

flood water, what are the odds of that one, so really in this case just use

common sense, if a deal looks too good to be true, a great car for only fifteen

hundred dollars or five hundred dollars, it's probably a bad deal to buy one in

an auction, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos,

remember to ring that Bell!