Thinking of buying a used car? Not so quick!

[splat]

Take it to the mechanic or look under the console/dash/behind the glove box. Lots of flooded are flooding the market right now (see what I did there?).

If not, be prepared to replace the wiring harness when it corrodes and you pay many labor hours to diagnose it, and the ECU is merely a ticking time bomb.

If the car is "freshly detailed" your ears should perk up a little.

 

[wazzuFreddo]

Saw them towing one up 880 today that still had all the sludge all over it.

 

[FLH03RIDER]

Agree, although a little too soon for the San Jose cars to be offered up, give it a month or two.

 

[TheRobSJ]

I had a guy being me a MDX a year or two ago. Had only a couple hundred miles on it and was maybe a 2012 model. An absolute basket case. Guy bought it with a salvage title for about $30k-ish. It was an untitled car that apparently got flooded at a NJ/NY dealer (maybe fell off a ferry who knows). All I know was that the car was submerged in salt water to at least half way up the door.

Guy had already put over $15k into with with a used engine and some other butcher repairs at some other shop that got in way over their head.

Then I came up with an estimate for somewhere around $40k to make the car properly functional. Which still would leave a unibody that had what looked like it had 20 years of east coast rust on it.

Years before that, I had a Katrina flood car try to come through with tons of lights on the dash. That estimate was well into the $20k area for a used car that wasn't even worth $20k to begin with.

Moral of the story...those cars that get flooded? They should just stay at the bottom of the lake. Modern cars are not submarines. If you submerge them up to about where the pedals are, they're completely fucked.

 

[wazzuFreddo]

 

[Climber]

Good point, OP. :thumbup

Though I think that the smart money is going to take these cars to another part of the country where they won't be thinking of checking for flood damage.

 

[aminalmutha]

It'd have to be a very special car and a very, very good deal for me to consider a salvage title vehicle.

Many insurance companies will pay up to 75% of the value of the vehicle to have a car repaired before it's salvaged and large percentage of claims are on fairly new vehicles.

So... that car that was worth $30k when it was hit that now carries a salvage title? Yeah, it had over $23k worth of damage. Which means some shop bought it, swapped over salvaged parts, skipped over stuff that could squeak by and flipped it for a profit.

I've worked with body shop peepz... 98% of them are on meth.

No thanks.

 

[Sharky]

Take it to the mechanic or look under the console/dash/behind the glove box. Lots of flooded are flooding the market right now (see what I did there?).

If not, be prepared to replace the wiring harness when it corrodes and you pay many labor hours to diagnose it, and the ECU is merely a ticking time bomb.

If the car is "freshly detailed" your ears should perk up a little.

All those cars are going to get shipped to the east coast for resale...

 

[HappyHighwayman]

Other than the flooding cars last significantly longer our here than on the East Coast. Hell in Canada most people I knew's cars lasted 5-6 years.

 

[Sharky]

In my younger years, I would buy just about anything, salvaged or not if the price was right. EXCEPT anything with water or flood damage. Those are nightmares waiting to happen even for cars 20 years ago, let alone electronic heavy cars of today.