Chris Tuttle

Hi,

I am looking at buying a 2010 S4 and am hoping to get some help with a few questions I have. These questions aren't as much about the car (I'm already sold on that) as they are the buying process as the situation has some unique circumstances.

I am working with a private party seller out of Ohio (I'm in Utah) who just got to the end of his 3 year lease and is selling the car at an incredible price. It's about $9k less than what the car bluebooks for with only 25k miles on it. He told me he just want's to pay off the lease and isn't interested in making any money. This is a little hard to believe because the same car here would go for a lot more.

I did a car fax report and everything there checked out so now I am to the point where I am ready to order an inspection and if that come's back positive, get a plane ticket out there, check out the car and hopefully drive it back.

This will be my first out of state purchase from a private party dealer and though I think I'm going about it the right way (car fax ----> inspection ----> personal inspection ----> purchase) I would love to hear if anyone has had an experience like this and can help me make sure I'm not missing anything. I would also love to know what inspection services are recommended too.

Thanks for your help, hopefully if all goes well I'll be on here a lot more.

Naota

Sorry no experience. Just make sure you fully check the car before buying. I am glad you are going down their in person. GL and we hope to see you join our community very soon!

ob_1jr

there is a thread on audizine about a car with subframe damage...it didnt show up on the carfax until he went to go trade it in. (clean carfax when he bought it, subframe damage around 8 months later on the carfax) You ran the carfax yourself right and got the guarantee from the site? Make sure you get a good inspection done on it. This sounds fishy. Unless you know the guy personally, I would be very leary. Also, Ohio uses salt on the road in the winter. I would make sure there isnt any rust underneath.

Toecutter

I would call ahead and arrange a pre-purchase inspection at a local shop. This service varies in price. I've paid as little as $99 for a simple inspection on an old Subaru and as much as $500 for a thorough one on a Porsche 911. You've already thought of this, so it's not news to you. In the past the mechanics who've done my inspections recommended what level of inspection they thought was necessary. If they advised a compression test then the cost was higher and they needed the car for several hours. For a car with 25K miles a compression test might be overkill, but I'd defer to the mechanic.

I would ask the seller where he got the car serviced and call that shop (dealership probably) to see if they can print out the car's history for you and talk about the car. I've found that mechanics are pretty open to discussing a car they've worked on. There must not be any privacy laws like there are with discussing people's medical issues.

Car dealerships capitalize on people who don't want to bother with selling their own car and are okay with taking thousands of dollars less on a trade-in than they could make by selling privately. Perhaps this seller is in that same group? I've sold many things for far less than what they should or could have sold simply so I could sell it quickly, as I have things I'd rather do than spend time having strangers come to my house to browse my stuff.

I recall reading an anecdote about selling jewelry at a swap meet. The seller kept marking down prices because no one was buying. The lower he priced it the less interest people had. Eventually he jacked up the prices way above what he was originally asking and suddenly they started selling. The moral of the story was that people associate low prices with low quality, and high prices with high quality despite the product being exactly the same.

Snikt21

Pre-inspection is a must. An ounce of prevention....

Chris Tuttle

Thanks for your thoughts and feedback.

Up to this point I have only looked at using a mobile inspection service to do the inspection on the car, a few that I have found are CarChex.com, AIM Mobile Inspections, and InspectMyRide.com (AIM had the highest reviews as far as I could tell).

Do you think a mobile inspection is sufficient? Or would you recommend I find a local shop and ask the owner to take it there for me? I hesitate to ask the owner to be running around for me when there's no guarantee I'll buy the car until after I see it. But if there's things a shop can only do that are an absolute must, then I may ask the owner to work with me.

Toecutter

I can't comment on the mobile inspection but when I paid for the $500 PPI it was out of state and part of the cost was the shop fetching the car from the seller and returning it to them.

helix139

Unless the owner has a lift, take it to a shop

Chris Tuttle

How would I go about finding a shop that would do this?

Chris Tuttle

I called my local Audi dealer today and asked about an inspection, they said they do prepurchase inspections for customer selling their Audi's all the time. They said it's about $129 and takes about an hour, but that it's thorough and would for sure find any major problems.

Do you think something like this would be sufficient? I kind of like the idea of having Audi inspect it.

Thanks so much for your help.