Looked at 2 pre-owned with low miles, Fiesta and Versa Fiesta was a repo, had a decade of rust and the engine block look greenish.............ran away. Versa had low miles and a weird carfax report.
Found out that the shop took it from inventory to run and pick up parts for a year and then sell as a preowned. "Well if I knew that we could have skipped the test-drive" Getting a car that was driven by mechanics help me sleep. 11.5 g with 8,000+ miles. Anyway it explains why the carfax looked weird, if you see one similar it may be a car used by the dealership, people can be spitefull just b4 a repo. Hope this helps somebody
I would look into Mazdas. When I was looking at buying a car a little while ago, the stuff that was around for Mazdas was much more affordable (better car per dollar) than other brands, especially Honda. Hondas hold their value really well. Which is great if you are selling one, not so great if you are buying one. And if you are into fixing things yourself, Mazdas tend to be really easy to work on. And recently have had among the lowest cost of maintenance of any manufacturer. I would look around for a Mazda 6 or 3 if I were you. A quick glance around my local craigslist, and I am seeing stuff around 2011-2012 Mazda 6 with about 110-130k miles for around $4-5k.
Guess I'll give an update since I've been quiet and things have since advanced.
The altima. I went to chicago to see the car on saturday and the person seemingly bailed, or something. I got a call on the way over from the person saying to call them and that their phone was going to be offline for a bit. That was odd, and when I called back, the line was dead and has been since. Texted to try to get a place to meetup, no response. At this point I'm thinking that maybe it was a scam, or the person was incompetent, or something else. Don't know, and as such I'm crossing this one off my board.
The accord is the fallback plan at this moment.
I've managed to find a pretty good deal on a 2005 Audi TT and having tested the car in person, it looks promising. It did throw a code on the OBD2 I bought, P0171. Have been talking to a local dealer to see if they have any advice regarding the code. The plan is that if what the dealer has to say is good, we're going to have it brought to a dealer in Chicago to have a full inspection done of the car, and then buy it if it look good. Current price is in the $4500~ range but can probably talked down to closer to $4000 if all goes smoothly. Fingers crossed.
I would lean towards whichever one has lower mileage.
Although I do also tend to prefer older cars because they're easier and cheaper (usually) to fix than new vehicles.
(My depth of knowledge is that I rebuilt an engine for a 1973 Pontiac Catalina [land yacht]. Big block 400 C.U.I. engine. Never got it running because I dropped out of the auto-tech program and half of my tools got stolen by the kids in the class)
Its the base one model with the straight 4 and 180ish horsepower, at least off the top of my head.
I already ran the vin on carfax, it checks out. It had a minor accident but there's no visible damage. I'm going to ensure that the dealer mechanics check over the frame when if I end up going after this one hard.
Yeah i suppose its a Audi TT MK1 first generation 1999 - 2005. Which in that case has a 1.8 Turbo engine which is okay. The Audi TT MK2 have Tfsi and Tsi engines which are garbage.
