Hello A7 Owners,

I am looking for a Red 2012 or 2013 A7 Prestige. Not many around. I found one in another state at a dealer. CarFax shows no issues. Does the spare tire area look correct to you A7 owners? It is not fully painted and does not show any tools. Pic is from dealer's website. Could it have been hit in the rear?

Thanks for your help.

 

Welcome to the forum!

The spare tire looks normal to me. I have white and although it's harder to see, I also have light gray primer showing in the spare wheel well area. The tool tray is under the spare and you can see the edges peeking through the holes. Under the tool tray is the battery. Jack is on the left and subwoofer is on the right.

We were searching for a Garnet red A7. My wife also wanted the nougat interior. For some reason, Audi didn't make the 2012's that way. She chose the interior color over the exterior and we ended up with white. The CarFax was clean but a visual inspection revealed slight damage to a front fender. That gave her and my daughter leverage to get the price dropped. Hopefully your A7 will be as clean as the Carax.

 

Thanks for the info. That's reassuring. A little scary buying a car long distance. I plan to hire a mechanic to do a pre purchase inspection.

 

Honestly go and test drive the car yourself. I do not trust the pre purchase mechanics inspection. Our 2014 CPO Audi A6 was bought from Chicago and it was vibrating badly on the highway due to 2 bent rims that was not found on CPO process so I had to battle the dealer to replace them and they ended up only repairing them and still vibrated so I payed money out of my pocket and got 2 new 20 inch rims. I also had a new 2011 BMW 5 series I bought from dealer here in Michigan and it had vibration on the highway 70-75 mph and the dealer couldn't fix it and replaced all rims and tires and road force them and replaced driveshaft 1x and I lemoned the car after 1 year and there was many other people on bimmerfest and bimmerforums with the f10 BMW 5 series vibrating issue.

The lesson I learnt was to drive that car you buy for a long bit before you put your money down. I am fed up with the problems that arises with the cars I bought in the past from not driving it extensively. I have a problem free 2016 A7 that I drove before buying and 2012 Audi A8L that is fantastic. I also drove my 2013 GS F-Sport a long bit (10 miles) before leasing it and it was great. Same goes with my 2015 BMW X5.

 

Warranty is key on a long distance purchase. If you can get someone to verify it hasn't been in an accident and Audi or 0thers can pull up service records, then the warranty is helpful to cover anything else that might be an issue

 

The car is supposed to have about 4 more months of factory warranty and about 6000 more miles, according the CarFax and the dealer. There were no maintenance items at all on the CarFax which I found weird. Not even an oil change. Just registrations and inspections, all in that locality. The selling dealer (who is not an Audi dealer) supposedly contacted the local Audi dealer for service records, but got no response yet.

 

We were looking at a local A7 and took the VIN to the Audi service writer. Found out the car only had oil changes. Passed on that one... Found the one we bought at a Volvo dealer, got the VIN and checked it out. Never missed a service, had a number of tires replaced and still had two Audi services left.

PM me if you want more details about a long distance purchase.

 

An update to this post. I did purchase the 2012 Red A7 in Houston, TX. I had it inspected by The Swiss Garage, a local mechanic shop that specializes in Porsche-Audi. The only things they found were clogged windshield washers and several paint scratches on the passenger side. They said it was in otherwise excellent condition and the next scheduled maintenance (45,000 mile) had already been done. They said the brakes had about 30% left. The Swiss Garage was very nice to work with.

The company I purchased the car from is NXCESS Motorcars of Houston. They specialize in high-end cars. In fact, when I was in their showroom there was about $1,000,000 worth of cars within a 10 foot radius of me. NXCESS had the paint scratches touched up by their detail shop and then took the car to an Audi dealer who had a special tool to unclog the washers. They sent me photos of the repaired scratches which looked pretty good.

With the inspection report I negotiated a final price for the car, put down a deposit and took a morning flight from Indiana to Houston. I inspected it, took it for a test drive, finished the paperwork and drove it 1000 miles over two days, back to Indiana. The car ran perfectly. No problems at all.

A week or so later I took it to my local Audi Dealer for the passenger airbag recall and to have them inspect it since it would be timing out of warranty soon. The only thing they found was it needed a wheel alignment. Interestingly, the previous owner left his user name and password to his Houston Audi Dealer's service website in the Owner's Manual. So I was able to log on and see all of the maintenance records none of which were in the CarFax report. All service had been done on or ahead of schedule and nothing unusual showed up.

I have been driving it for 2 months now and couldn't be happier. I will post pictures of it in the photos section of this site.

Thanks again to everyone who offered me advice on this purchase.

 

Thanks for the update and congratulations on the new car. Nothing like a two day road trip to figure out what all the buttons, dials and switches do.

 

I really like road trips in our cars! Look forward to them even for work. When you have to fly commercial, why not drive in a land jet more comfy and with more features!