Buying Your Dream Car, Part 2: Where To Find It

2023 Author: Natalie MacDonald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-11-26 13:59

So, you have decided how much the car of your dreams should cost, and this amount suits you. Now let's figure out where and how best to look for your future purchase - so that there is plenty to choose from, and then not to regret your choice.

Where to look for a car is not necessary

Where is it at least risky to buy a used car? First of all, in underground car dealerships that have nothing to do with bona fide sellers. Knowing that their reputation is low, sometimes they pretend to be official dealers or, conversely, on the phone pretend to be a private owner selling his own car. Agree, when they try to deceive you at the start, the result of the transaction is also unlikely to please you.

Sometimes unscrupulous sellers unite under the roof of a beautiful building with a loud name, but more often they rent the corners of underground parking lots, floors in former taxi companies, or even just a piece of asphalt fenced off in the open air. Somewhere below the signboard, there will most likely be an ad “Acceptance of cars for commission”, documents will be sealed by an unknown individual entrepreneur, there will be either cars with an incomprehensible history, or outright scammers may be hiding under the sign of the salon, luring money from potential buyers.

Buying a car from an ad posted in a local newspaper or at the entrance to a garage cooperative is also not a good idea. At least because the legal check of such a car falls entirely on the shoulders of the buyer.

Searching offline

A more reliable option is to find a friend who sells his car. At least you will know its past: mileage, breakdowns, legal status. But there is no need to talk about choosing a "dream car" - you have to take what you have. Most likely, there will be no serious bargaining with a familiar person, and the price will probably turn out to be even higher than the market average.

Another way to find a used car “live” is to visit the trade-in departments of authorized dealers. At least in a deal with a dealer, the likelihood of legal problems with the car is lower, although they cannot be completely ruled out - everyone is wrong. But if you are not in a hurry, then the purchased car will be given to you with a clean interior and performed MOT, and as at (or as a purchase at an attractive price) you can add a set of winter tires, make a discount on the next MOT, etc.

However, when searching for a car by dealer, it is difficult to cover all the available offers. You can go around a bunch of places, waste a lot of time, but this does not guarantee that you will see all the cars that would suit you. The SkodOctavi of your dreams can also stand at a dealer of a Japanese or Korean brand, if the previous owner decided to change it to a RAV4 or Sorento. And, of course, this method of searching drops out cars that are sold by "private traders". But they often have the most interesting options.

Searching on the web

Today, there are many online sites on the Internet that help sell used cars. There you can find both private ads and from trade-in dealerships. A friend of yours will also show his car there, if you don't intercept it earlier.

Among the services there are also small - regional, where there are only a couple of options suitable for you, there are specialized ones - for example, selling rare or racing cars. But the weather is made by large classifications, on the pages of which hundreds of thousands of proposals are put up every day. They are trying to give this market a more civilized form, forcing sellers to indicate the identification numbers of cars, checking their legal purity, weeding out fraudulent ads …

We are looking for Avto.ru

Avto.ru is one of the largest services in Russia for the sale of used cars, both "dealer" and from private sellers. We already have the largest ad base in Moscow and a number of other regions. And many cars are for sale only on Automotive.ru, which we, after checking the uniqueness, tell you by assigning to such ads matching badge … With its help, such sentences are easy to identify among the rest.

Badge ads "Only on Avto.ru" is becoming more and more - for example, in Moscow there are already a third of them. In order not to miss any interesting offer, you can sort the list of cars By uniqueness - then all cars with a badge "Only on Avto.ru" will be shown first.

In addition to uniqueness, Auto.ru checks every ad posted on the site for many other parameters. If it is found that the seller changed the identification data in the ad or posted photos of another car, such offers are immediately removed from the search. As well as those in which machines are trying to sell under fraudulent schemes.

Automotive.ru also finds out the entire history of the car being sold - the real mileage, its legal status, service history, possible accidents and insured events. Automotive.ru also stores the entire history of ads, by which you can find out on what conditions, in what condition and with what mileage the car was sold before. All this information is available to every potential buyer - directly from the ad, in a few clicks. So we try to make the purchase of a car as safe as possible - because when verifying the data, sometimes facts are found that hint (and sometimes just scream) about the dark past of the car.

Let's say the car you are interested in is not for sale on Automotive News, then, perhaps, its owner has something to hide. But if you have the data of such a car, then in the Reports you can enter the VIN or state number of a potential purchase and get all the information about this car that has accumulated from Avto.ru.