We Buy The Car Of Your Dreams. Part 3: Selecting Ads

2023 Author: Natalie MacDonald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 02:36

So, you have already decided on the budget for the car of your dreams and figured out its trim levels. We looked at the model live, found it with friends or acquaintances, and you like it even more. You may have even stopped by a couple of dealers at a trade-in, but after reading the second part of our recommendations, you nevertheless decided to focus on finding a car on the Internet. Let's figure out how to select the most promising among the many ads.

What to do if there are few ads

This is quite possible - for example, if you are looking for a rare model. Or too new. Or you impose too strict requirements on your future purchase, which few cars in the secondary market initially satisfy.

In a sense, this simplifies the choice - you need to study a few ads, call the sellers and in a relatively short time watch it live, check each car. In order to end up buying the best of them.

But the scenario is much more likely that your dream car will not be on the short list of offers at all. Because some cars will have technical or legal problems, embarrass with their mileage, or simply be sold somewhere on the other side of the country. What to do in this case?

The first option is to wait. Thousands of new ads appear on Avto.ru every day, and among them at any moment the "same" car, suitable for all your wishes, may flash. You just need to subscribe to updates on the parameters you need - this is done literally in one click at the bottom of the page with ads. By subscribing, you will learn about new offers as soon as they appear on Avto.ru.

Well, to be patient is also worth it - a good car is not always easy to find quickly.

The second option is to weaken the strict collar of requirements by expanding the list of candidates. For example, add cars of other colors to the search, except for your so beloved black. With more ads, your chances of finding your dream car, be it a blue or white, will skyrocket. Moreover, now it is quite easy to change the color of the car - for example, with the help of a film. We also wrote about how to legalize this later.

What to do when there are a lot of ads

Auto.ru has a huge database of ads, therefore, when choosing a popular model, you need to be prepared for the fact that there will be a lot of cars on sale. It is physically impossible to negotiate with sellers and inspect dozens or even hundreds of cars. It is necessary to conduct a preliminary selection that will help focus on the most suitable candidates.

What you shouldn't do is to severely shorten the list of ads with strict restrictions on the year of manufacture, mileage or price of the car. Otherwise, there is a risk of missing out on an interesting option that just slightly falls short of your requirements. It is important to understand: Cars that have spent most of their lives in Russia are for the most part sold on Avto.ru and in the secondary market in general. They drove on our, far from ideal roads, suffered from winter reagents, did not always refuel with high-quality fuel … Such operation carries an element of luck, and there is no direct relationship between the condition of the car, its mileage and age. And the seller sets the price at all, guided exclusively by subjective calculations or desires.

Therefore, it is better to discard at once only copies that are too expensive for you and those that have, well, very high mileage, which inevitably reduces the residual resource of most units. And then you should only do this if you personally plan to drive a dream car happily ever after.

Defining a basic list of ads is easy by applying filters based on maximum price and mileage. It would be more correct not to “cut” all other candidates, but to rank them.

First of all, sort the proposals by "Estimation of value" - what this estimate is, we recently talked about in the first part. In short, this is a machine analysis of several factors, including price, year of manufacture, mileage, and so on, which helps the user to understand how a particular offer fits the market.

And then - look through the ads on the list, starting from the top. In all ads, it is worth paying attention not only to beautiful photographs, but also to factors that can strongly influence the condition of the car and its attractiveness as a purchase.

First of all, it is better to look at cars that have not been involved in an accident. Of course, the accident of the accident is different and the results of a minor collision can be corrected without consequences for further operation. But there is always a possibility that the repair was not very high quality, and it will be more difficult to sell a car with an accident in history.

The second factor is the number of owners. If the car had too many of them, then you will no longer know its entire history. And a series of quick resales may hint that something is wrong with the car. That it is defective or part of some kind of fraudulent scheme. And you run the risk of becoming its potential victim. Therefore, first it is better to look for copies that had only one owner. At the same time, you will be able to find out "first-hand" how and when the machine was serviced and operated. There is an opinion that the condition of a used car strongly depends on the character of the driver, which means that it will also be useful to take a closer look at the real owner.

And if you want a completely fresh car, you should look among those for which the manufacturer's warranty or an additional dealer's warranty is still valid. Such a car is attractive in that when buying it it is permissible to forgive minor technical flaws, which can then be eliminated at the dealer for free. As well as those design flaws that are invisible even upon close examination, but are able to manifest themselves later.

For the convenience of choosing the most attractive offers in the ads on Auto.ru there are special badges - badges. Icon "No accidents found" tells us that in the databases of the traffic police not a single incident involving the car being sold has been registered. Badge "1 owner" means that the car has been registered once and there is only one entry in its TCP. And the icon "On guarantee" followed by the month and year when it expires.

Finally, some cars are sold on Automotive News with a mark "Almost as good as new" … This badge is given to cars up to three years old (that is, often together with a "Guaranteed" badge), with low mileage and no serious accidents. Whether it will be a “tidbit” depends on the price set by the seller.

Badges on Auto.ru make the search easier and more transparent. Because the badges are placed in the ad not at the request of the seller, who wants to add attractiveness to his product, but on the basis of algorithms. The number of owners and the accident-free past is determined according to the traffic police data, the guarantee is according to the conditions that the automaker declares. Although in the latter case, the seller, when submitting an advertisement, can enter data on the extended warranty, which is available for many cars, and Auto.ru will take this information into account.

By the way, if you are firmly convinced that you only need a warranty car or are interested exclusively in offers from the first owner, then you can easily remove all other options from the search - there are corresponding filters in the search query parameters.

Of course, badges are not a guarantee of a hassle-free purchase. They only simplify the initial sorting of ads, after which the selected cars need to be studied more closely and better with a visit to a car service. A rare seller in the description will tell you about all the twists and turns of the history of the car and its shortcomings. Or show them on the photos attached to the ad. A more reliable, and most importantly, impartial source of information will be the Auto.ru report. We check all cars sold by VIN, and the basic data - the number of former owners, legal clarity, the presence of traffic accident records in the traffic police databases - are shown directly in the ad, for free.

But if some machine has sunk into your soul, then it is better to buy a full report - there is much more information in it. So, an accident with a car could not get into the traffic police reports, for example, when registering it according to the European protocol. But in the records of insurance companies, it will appear, often together with the calculation of the cost of repairs, which makes it possible to assess the damage to the car in an accident.

The VIN report from Automotive News costs less than travel and the time spent on inspecting the "problem" option. Not to mention the possible financial losses after an imprudent purchase of such a car. Moreover, choosing a car from several options, you can save money if you buy a package of reports for 10 ads at once.