Auto Inspections: A Culture of Lies

I heard recently that 38 states require some sort of yearly auto inspection. Whether that’s a safety inspection or a safety and emissions inspection will vary depending on where you live, but one thing seems to be true regardless of where you look: Lies abound.

It seems that when an individual is forced to buy something by the government, the person selling does everything they can to take advantage of the situation. In this case, people are forced to buy inspections and the people providing the inspections seem to overwhelmingly take advantage of that.

How? Well, inspections require the car to go up on a lift. The only facilities that have lifts are ones that also do auto repairs. From my experience, a good majority of those facilities will tell you something needs to be fixed in hopes that you’ll just get it done at their facility. For example, a friend recently had her car fail because 2 of the tires didn’t have enough tread. The shop offered to replace the tires at a reasonable rate on the spot so she could pass the inspection and get on her way. She didn’t think her tires were bad, but having zero power to question the authority of the shop without getting tagged with a no-drive sticker and paying the inspection fee again, she just agreed to getting the new tires. After all, she couldn’t afford to take a day off of work. Once the new tires were on, she asked to take the old tires home and the shop claimed they had already disposed of them. What? You can’t burn tires or toss them in a trash compactor, so that was just a bold-faced lie and proof that the shop had lied during the inspection to make a quick buck.

This isn’t an unusual story. The state that I live in now has cameras in the shops that are doing the inspections, but a camera on the corner of the wall can’t tell if the tech doing the inspection is lying about the tread left on a tire or whether or not he hears an exhaust leak. Sure, a shop could lose their license if a state inspector goes undercover and brings a perfectly good car in that fails, but the odds of that happening are pretty low. Furthermore, if you get your inspection done at the same place year after year or have kids with you, the inspector can probably figure out that it’s not a random spot check.

Switching to a state-run system, eliminating the no-drive stickers and giving people a more reasonable buffer to get repairs done is usually scoffed at because of the cost. So here’s my plan: Eliminate inspections in every state. It’s much too subjective and puts repair shops in a position to take advantage of low-income families that drive older vehicles. Inspections are not effective at removing truly unsafe vehicles from the roadways, so eliminating them shouldn’t have an impact on the number of accidents. It will, however, boost sales of pre-owned vehicles and help low-income families maintain employment. A win-win for everyone.

5 Tips for Selling Cars on Craigslist

The past week has been a whirlwind. My husband’s car died and it was the type of engine failure where you buy a new car rather than fix the one you’ve got. We are on a shoestring budget and couldn’t scrape together much for a replacement. In our hunt for a cheap car, we found ourselves looking at Craigslist. After scanning literally hundreds of listings for cars and looking at several, I thought I’d put together a few tips for those thinking of selling their car on Craigslist. These tips will help minimize your headaches and get your car sold faster.

1.) Post your vehicle when you plan to be home. New listings get the most views, so post your car when you’ll be around to show it to prospective buyers. Going out of town for a few days? Wait until you get back to post your vehicle. Not available Monday-Friday? Post it on Friday night and show it on the weekend.

2.) Check your messages or answer the phone. However you decide to have people get in contact with you, make sure it’s something you have access to, will check and will respond to. I’d say at least 90% of the ads we responded to either never got back to us or took more than 24 hours to respond. I know you may be flooded with interest, so go ahead and recruit someone else to help respond to messages or set up an auto response.

3.) Include all pertinent information in the ad. If you’re finding yourself flooded with messages to the point that you can’t keep up, you’ve either done a poor job of researching prices OR you didn’t include enough information in your ad. More than once I saw ads that simply had a photo and a year and said, “Contact X for more information”. That’s not acceptable. It takes 5 minutes to write a Craigslist ad. Not sure where to start? Include at least the bare minimums:

• Year, Make & Model
• Price
• Mileage — don’t write 140,000 as 140 in the little form that Craigslist provides because it will screw with the search feature.
• Any known issues (check engine light is on, needs brakes, power window won’t work, etc.)
• Any body damage (pictures are helpful)
• A VIN number so buyers can do a Carfax report
• Any other important information that you may want to include such as availability to show the vehicle, issues with the tile, etc.

4.) Take new, clear pictures of the vehicle for your ad. I can’t even tell you how many photos of cars were from the wrong season, had kids or animals in them, or were just so grainy that you couldn’t really see the car. I especially liked the nighttime photos that were close-ups of the rear-view mirror or something like that. Were these people drunk when they posted the ad?

5.) Do not be misleading. If you post in your ad that the car has no problems and drives great, it should actually have no problems and drive great. There was one vehicle in particular that we were told had no problems, so we went to see it. After driving an hour to see the car, we found out that it didn’t start (needed to be jumped), had a history of not starting, had problems that would prevent it from passing a safety inspection, needed brakes, needed tires, had a very loud engine noise when driving and probably should have been in the junkyard in the sky. We were upset that we had wasted so much time and gas going up to see the car. If the owner had been straightforward, we wouldn’t have wasted our time or his. Granted, with all of those issues listed, nobody would want to see the car at the price he had it listed at. It was a parts car at best.

Basically, include pictures, include an abundance of information and be available to respond to interested buyers and to show the vehicle. Look at your ad before posting and ask yourself if YOU were looking for a car, would your ad answer all of your questions? If you went to see the car based on your ad, would you be severely disappointed?