After all these years driving demos, I finally need to buy my own car again. The timing couldn’t be worse, as we also need to reshingle the roof on The Garage at some point in the next couple of months. As a result, we are on a tighter budget than would have been the case normally so the used car shopping has begun. I think I’ll take this opportunity to bring our readers along for the ride. Fortunately todays’ shopping trip provided some incredible examples of what to look out for when you are buying a used car.

Earlier in my career, I spent close to 6 years working in the service department of a Volvo dealership. During this time, I not only fell in love with the brand, but put on literally hundreds of thousands of miles on a long list of used Volvo 240s. There was an ugly yellow 240 DL, with it’s manual choke and then the silver years. 242 GT, GLT and then the glorious 245 Turbo. These cars were a blast to drive and were close to indestructible. The Turbo wagon was even pretty cool to look at! It makes sense then that with the budget constraints we have, that we should be looking for mid Nineties Volvo wagon of some sort. While it may seem like a Nissan Service Manager should be driving a Nissan, there are no used wagons or SUV’s in the lineup that fit the budget. Fortunately, we have a couple of months to shop, so we can keep our eyes open and use our heads.

In the local online Trader yesterday, there was a good potential candidate. The ad read 1995 850 Turbo wagon, yet the picture clearly showed a wagon sporting GLE/GLT wheels. When I called, the seller seemed surprised and said those were the wheels on the car when they got it. It was a US car they had bought from friends. I was interested. If it was a GLE/GLT and not a Turbo, I’d be able negotiate a grand off the asking price. If it really was a turbo with the wrong wheels, that might get me about 5 hundred off the top. We arrived at the appointed time, just as the car was being driven down the street by another potential buyer. I made a mental note of the puff of blue smoke from the tailpipe. If this really is a turbo car, the blower is likely shot.

Once the other guy was gone, it was my turn to have a go at the car. The badging indicated that it was indeed a turbo car, so a look under the hood would be in order. Not only did the car have the wrong wheels, but the wrong front bumper, with no front fog lights. A quick glance inside while popping the hood showed well worn leather and 114,000 miles on the odo. The front of the hood was peppered with stone chips, but more importantly a big run in the clear coat. Hmmm…wrong bumper and a repainted hood. What are we going to find under here? What we find is an engine bay that looks like the car has closer to 200,000. Otherwise though, things don’t look too bad. The oil is clean and there is no sludge build up under the oil cap. All the parts under the hood appear to have the correct stickers and there are no obvious signs of a heavy hit. At this point, I already know that this isn’t the car for us but we’re going for a drive anyway. We have a blog post to write.

On the road, the car feels like a typical 850 Turbo. Heavy and slow feeling until the throttle is opened and then it goes like a scared cat. On the highway it feels like all four tires are out of balance, but otherwise the car doesn’t feel too bad. As I’m looking around, I realized that the right side airbag was all bumpy. A closer study of the steering wheel showed a deployed airbag that had been carefully closed up and repainted by a vinyl repair specialist. A pretty crappy job at that, I just hadn’t noticed yet. The seller declined to allow me to take pics of the airbags, stating “I don’t want you to get me in trouble.”

Was this seller a victim of some previous scam, or the street front for a car sales & theft ring? We’ll never know, but the uninformed customer could very easily turn into an unfortunate buyer. In this case, the seller was a European woman who was very charming and played the “I’m just a woman, what do I know?” card. But there was that one comment about getting in trouble. As for us, we’ll keep watching the trader and reporting back to our readers what we find along the way.