What to do before you buy a used car

Four costs arrive with the car, and none of them are in the asking price:

• Title and registration. Arizona charges title and registration fees, and the vehicle license tax inside your registration is worked out from the vehicle's assessed value rather than from what you paid the seller, so a cheap car with a high original list price is not cheap to register.
• Insurance. Get a real quote on the specific VIN before you commit. Two cars at the same price can be hundreds of dollars a year apart.
• Emissions. Vehicles registered in the Tucson and Phoenix areas generally need an emissions test, with exemptions including the newest model years and electric vehicles. A car that will not pass is a car you cannot register.
• The first month. Assume the previous owner deferred something. Tires, brakes, a timing belt or a full fluid service can follow any used car home.

One thing Arizona does not charge a private buyer is state use tax: the Department of Revenue treats a casual sale between two individuals as exempt. Buying from an out-of-state dealer is different, and tax is collected when you register. Both are set out in the sources at the foot of this page.

Work out those four numbers first, subtract them from what you have, and the remainder is your actual car budget. Doing it in this order is what stops a $12,000 budget quietly becoming a $13,400 purchase.

Search for the exact year, engine and transmission, not the model line. Owner forums and model-specific communities are more useful here than professional reviews, because reviews are written when the car is new and problems show up at 90,000 miles. You are looking for three things: what commonly fails, at roughly what mileage, and what the repair costs.

Then check for open safety recalls. NHTSA publishes a free VIN lookup at nhtsa.gov/recalls, which tells you whether a recall on that specific vehicle is still outstanding. An open recall is not automatically a reason to walk. It is a reason to know, and often something the seller can have done before you buy.

Finally, price the car in context. Look at what the same year and trim, with comparable mileage, is actually listed for near you. You are not trying to find a number to quote at the seller; you are trying to understand whether this listing is normal, high, or suspiciously low. A price well under the market is a question, not a bargain.

Read it twice. The second time, read it for what is absent.

• Photographs. How many, and of what? A seller with nothing to hide photographs all four corners, the interior, the odometer and the engine bay. Seven photographs of the same front three-quarter angle is a decision somebody made.
• Specifics. Does the description mention the trim, the engine, the service history, the reason for selling? Or could it have been written about any car of that model?
• Language that hedges. "Runs great" is not a claim about anything. "Needs nothing" is. Note which one you are being given, and ask about the other.
• Who is selling. A listing with no name, several cars posted by the same account, or a phone number that appears on other listings is probably not a private owner. That matters enough to have its own step in the private-seller guide.

Write down the questions the listing did not answer. Those are the ones you are about to ask on the phone.

Ask for the VIN before you drive anywhere. A seller who will not give you a VIN has ended the conversation for you. With it, there are three things worth running:

• A full history report. The federal title system behind most reports is NMVTIS, which lists the providers approved to sell them at vehiclehistory.bja.ojp.gov. A report shows title brands, reported accidents, the sequence of recorded odometer readings, and how many owners and states the car has passed through.
• A free theft and salvage check. The NICB runs VINCheck at no cost. It is worth running and worth understanding: it only cross-references records from participating insurance companies, so a clean result is not a clean bill of health.
• The recall lookup from the previous step, if you have not already.

Read the report for coherence rather than for a verdict. Odometer readings that go backwards, a title that moved states shortly after an accident, or a one-owner car with four owners are all reasons to ask a specific question. What no report can show you is the damage nobody claimed, which is the whole reason the physical inspection still exists.

Call rather than message. You learn as much from the hesitations.

• Are you the owner, and is the title in your name? The most useful question there is. Anything other than a simple yes needs following up.
• Do you have the title in hand, and is there a lien on it? A car with an outstanding loan can still be bought safely, but the payoff has to happen as part of the sale rather than afterwards.
• Why are you selling it? Let them talk.
• What has been repaired, and what does it need? Every used car needs something. A seller who says "nothing" is either unusually lucky or not paying attention.
• Do you have service records? Receipts are worth more than recollections.
• Has it been in an accident? Ask even when the report was clean. You are comparing answers, not collecting one.
• Can I have it inspected by an independent inspector? Ask this on the first call, not at the end of the negotiation. A no here saves you everything that would have come next.
• Can you leave it cold for me? Ask them not to start it before you arrive. It is a small request, and a refusal is informative.

Arrive early if you can, in daylight, and walk the car before you speak to anybody. Feel the hood: a warm engine on a car you asked to be left cold is the single most common thing worth noticing in a driveway.

Then work around it in the same order every time:

• Down each side at a low angle, looking for waves, ripples and mismatched paint.
• Panel gaps, and whether the two sides of the car agree with each other.
• Tires: same brand on all four, and worn evenly across the tread.
• Fluids, with the engine cold: oil, coolant, brake fluid.
• The VIN through the windshield and on the driver's door jamb, against the paperwork.
• Inside: damp carpet, the smell of the cabin, wear against the odometer.

Write the list down before you go and work through it in the same order every time. Reading from paper, rather than from memory, is what stops you being talked past something while the seller is standing next to you.

Insist on driving it yourself, and plan the route before you get in: a few minutes of stop-and-go, a rough or unmade surface, a stretch of highway, and an empty parking lot at the end.

• Radio off, windows down at low speed. You are listening for knocks, clicks, whines and rumbles that change with speed or steering.
• Brake hard once, somewhere safe and empty. The car should stop straight, without pulling, pulsing or a pedal that sinks.
• Let it shift through every gear, and then force a downshift by accelerating hard. Slipping, flaring and hunting all show up under load.
• Full-lock turns both ways in the parking lot, slowly, with the windows down. Clicking is a worn joint.
• Watch the temperature gauge at the end, sitting still, with the air conditioning running. Cooling problems appear in traffic, not on the move.

Twenty minutes is the floor. Anything shorter is a drive you will have to repeat in your head for a week afterwards.

A used car keeps one secret at every stage of this process: what it looks like from underneath, under load, with the fault codes read and the service history weighed against the condition. That is not information you can extract in a driveway, and it is the information that decides whether the price is right.

An independent inspection is one inspector, working for you, at the car, not the shop the seller recommends, however good that shop is. The seller found it, the seller has used it before, and the seller would like the car to pass. None of that requires anybody to be dishonest for the result to be worth less to you than an inspection you arranged yourself.

Whoever you use, two rules hold. It happens before the money moves, and you choose who does it. If the seller will not allow an inspection, that is the answer to a different question, and it is worth more than the inspection fee.

Findings sort themselves into three piles.

• Wear. Tires, brakes, a battery, a due service. Real money, entirely predictable. Price them and ask for the difference, with the quote in your hand rather than a number in your head.
• Deferred maintenance. Seeping gaskets, a tired suspension bush, a timing service that is overdue. Worth negotiating over, and worth knowing you will be spending a weekend on.
• The pile you walk away from. A structural repair, a slipping transmission, oil and coolant mixing, flood damage, or paperwork that does not match the car. None of those are negotiations. There is another car.

When you do negotiate, negotiate from the report rather than from opinion: here is the finding, here is the quote to put it right, here is what I can pay. It is a harder conversation to argue with, and it keeps the exchange about the car.

And be genuinely prepared to leave. The buyers who get the best outcome are not the sharpest negotiators. They are the ones who had already accepted that this particular car might not be the one.