Buying a used car, part 1

Hello all, this is Captain Sunny reporting.

For most budding university students, buying a brand new car straight out of their pockets is nary an option, for most of them are usually quite poor. This is why the used car market is so attractive to them most of the time.

A good place to start fishing for a used car is (if you're Australian) [city].gumtree.com.au where [city] is your state's capital city. There you can click on cars and whether you want a car under 5 grand or over 5 grand. There'll be pages upon pages of potential cars of your interest, click away and just browse through them and have some fun at first. Take note of some nice ones and bookmark them for later. You can do the same through other sites such as carsales.com.au and carsguide.com.au. Spend a good hour or several just imagining yourself driving away with that car.

However, buying a used car isn't as simple as looking at a car, Googling it and then shaking hands with the seller once they're satisfied. A used car is that, used, and has had a life with a/many previous owner(s). As such, there's a good chance there will be problems with the car (unless it's a $420,000 Aston Martin, in which case it probably never left the garage). Such problems range anything from the following

• High mileage
• Worn-out tyres and steering columns
• Engine problems including loose parts and corroded pipelines
• Dead or breaking suspension system
• Very bad smell
• General cosmetic dints
• A crash history.
• (and many, many more).

Weeding these problems out of the owner can often be quite a challenge for a typical seller is trying to get rid of his/her car and outlining the many problems including the history of baby vomit on the driver's seat is never a good selling point. However, with a keen eye and attention to detail a prospective buyer can often simply find these problems out themselves.

My used car, looks great, has problems you can't see from a photo

Take a look at my beloved Ford Mondeo here in the photograph (my friends have lovingly named it "Smelly".) From a mere photograph such as the one above, it doesn't look like there's a problem with it, right? Wrong. A good eye would notice that the bumper is a bit lopsided; it is slightly lower and loose on the left side of the car than it is on the right. This is usually a sign that the car has nudged a wall or a tree in the past, although not so strong that the bumper fell off. In other words, this was probably caused by the equivalent of you walking into a door. Nothing big.

Visual integrity is always the first thing you look for in a car since this is the most obvious portrayal of any problems as such. Are there scratch marks that don't look like general wear from rough surface driving? Does the car look like it has been keyed, pole scraped or dented at all? All these are signs of non-general wear that should fire up alarms in your head of damage. Whilst a car being keyed is probably the least of your worries right now, a pole scraping or a dent is more worrying. Ask the owner about these, making sure that you point directly to the spot rather than just mentioning it, so that he/she can't escape the question.

That's all for now. I'll talk about checking the specifics and stuff in my next post, coming up shortly!