By Gene Ayres, Your Consumer Curmudgeon

We've all been there, shopping for a new or used car. Where do you begin? The newspaper ads? (Those are practically nonexistent now.) Craigslist? KelleyBlueBook.com? Your local car dealer(s)? Where do you go? Who can you trust? How do we avoid getting ripped off, robbed blind, misled, misinformed, or unloaded upon? It’s almost impossible these days not to stumble into at least one pitfall.

My wife, who was born and raised in China, had never learned to drive, and in order to work in the Seattle area, a car is still a near-requirement. Public transportation is here to some degree, but it remains slow, expensive, and doesn't go everywhere (I am still stunned to hear the story of how Senator Warren Magnusun, decades ago, offered an earmark for the greater Seattle region for a complete light rail system from Tacoma to Everett, with 90% Federal funding, and the local voters turned it down—we will be paying for that stupidity for decades to come).

Meanwhile, we needed a car. Ideally it would be a hybrid. But those, like most green products, are too expensive and out of our budget (ironic, isn't it? Our best deal would still be an old gas guzzling clunker, and green incentives for people on limited budgets who can't afford new cars which now cost what houses used to, are still nonexistent).

My wife, after a bad experience with a used lemon when we bought my car three years back, wanted a new car. But the new cars in our price range were all low-end cars with low ratings, manual transmissions, and dismal safety records. For those with the time (and I urge you to take the time), read Consumer Reports for car reliability records. Also, Carfax.com has a crash test website that will provide the safety results and records for many, but not all, recent cars going back a decade or so.

Anyway, we finally found a car that met our basic needs. I am not going to name the year, make, or model here because this isn't intended to be a rating sheet for comparative shopping, and readers may have different needs, opinions, or experiences, and there are always exceptions in the car business to any rule. For example, one of my closest friends, an otherwise intelligent lawyer with a degree from Harvard, has been buying the same brand of car his entire adult life. This kind of loyalty is unfathomable to me. Not one of his cars has ever proven reliable, he has been ripped off repeatedly on dealer repairs that should have been under warranty, and yet he goes back again and again, year after year to the same old crooks. Maybe it's just a case of the Devil you know, our need for sticking with the familiar (certainly tried and true wouldn't apply with that particular U.S. manufacturer, but go figure). So this is about the overall experience of car shopping, not which car to buy.

In our case, our requirements were simple, or so we thought: a four door sedan that had good gas economy, low mileage (less than, say 60K), was reasonably safe and reliable, still under factory warranty, and not too expensive. Which, of course, is what everybody else is looking for these days. I started with the online ads, and began crosschecking particular listings on KellyBlueBook.com and Carfax (well worth the investment). I finally narrowed my search down to a couple of makes and models, looking for dealers that offered Carfax buyback warranties, which most legitimate ones do. I have given up on dealing with private parties after my near rip-off trying to sell a car last year, and similar near-rip-offs from fraudulent private sellers (tip: any car offered online that involves shipping or Western Union is an out and out fraud). At least a dealer will still be there if you need to go back, as we ended up doing.

Our first choice was a 2005 model with 53K miles, which seemed promising, from a used car dealer that specialized in resales of previous rental cars. This means recent models, not bad mileage but may or may not have been well maintained or carefully driven. The dealer had a Carfax, which showed no accidents. However, the Carfax was several months old, and current only to the time of this dealer's acquisition of the car (they usually get them from auctions). When I asked why it hadn't sold sooner, the explanation was reasonable: it had no add-on features like power windows, door locks, mirrors, stereo etc. and most buyers wanted those. My wife didn't care about options; she just wanted a car she could learn to drive. We bought the car and drove it home. It immediately started making a horrible noise, like there was an airplane tailgating us. I took it straight to the local service center for that make, but they were busy and took two days to get to it. When they finally put it up on a lift, they called me in. The car had been reamed, literally, underneath, and the entire frame had been twisted and damaged. No one had reported it. Apparently someone had test driven it at the dealer, run it off the road, over a median, or maybe into a deep ditch. Anyway, it was out of warranty, not repairable, and a total disaster. Also, the Washington State 72-hour lemon law return period had expired.

Now for the good news. We took it back to the dealer that had sold it to us, and they accepted it back without comment. One thing I've learned about the car business is that it is entirely amoral. Your favorite uncle will unload a lemon on you if he thinks you won't notice. Or certainly your neighbor. And most definitely a stranger or neighborhood dealer. This one's reaction was, oh well, you got me, try this one (getting money back would have required measures and problems we didn't have time or energy to pursue). We had two things going for us that day, another car a year newer, with more options and lower mileage had just come in and he hadn't even had time to clean it up or check it out. And the dealer wanted to get rid of us without further hassle. So we test drove it and it seemed fine, but I wanted a guarantee. In return for a higher price (which was reasonable, as it was a much better car even without the accident, and still lower than Blue Book—again, he wanted to get rid of us) he agreed we could check it out and bring it back again if there were any problems. We took it on written understanding that we had a week to get it checked out and to confirm that the factory warranty was good. We did, and it was. Bottom line: don't be afraid to take something back if it isn't what you wanted or expected. Even if the lemon law has expired. And always, always, check it out thoroughly with an expert. A legitimate dealer will allow you to do so (it may cost an extra $100, but again, it's worth it). In fact, by law they have to.

Now, about that still long-awaited light rail system, and those long suppressed solar and electric cars...

Gene Ayres is a career writer, author and freelance journalist. His latest book is A Billion to One: An American Insider in the New China. He can be found at: www.geneayres.org.