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Do sellers really allow me to take the vehicle away to a mechanic? Or does the seller accompany me to do that? That can take hours; will seller put up with that?
If they want your money, sure.
If they say no, there are a lot of cars out there.
Years ago, when I had a dealers license, I would legitimately sell vehicles from my residence. Even though it would be prudent for a potential buyer to have the vehicle mechanically inspected, I would not allow it. Eventually someone would just buy the vehicle after a test drive. Therefore why bother with the time and effort involved with a mechanical inspection.
Some private sellers may have the same point of view, why bother with a mechanical inspection if its not necessary to eventually sell the vehicle?
No, you would not be given the keys to the vehicle I still own to take and do whatever you think you need to do with it.
Yes, you will make an appointment with a mechanic of your choice and pay him in advance and I will take my vehicle to the shop and watch them do the inspection and wait until it is done. Then I will drive the vehicle I still own to my home while you get your report from the mechanic you have chosen and paid. Then you can let me know what your decision is.
I doubt that I would go to that much trouble to sell a car. My cars are closer to their end of life when I sell them. The buyer is first overwhelmed when I tell them everything I know of that is wrong with the car along with everything that I think might go wrong. I want them to know what they are buying. I also point out the positives. Now they expect the worst, but on the test drive, everything works, the car functions well enough, and sells it self. Any reasonable offer is accepted.
Find an independent mechanic that the both of you can agree on for location and time.
Cost is typically around $100-125 and takes 1-1.5 hours. Definitely want to have it on a lift so they can inspect underneath.
I'm not sure if a basic check will get you a compression check, though.
This is definitely time and money well spent.
Compression tests are nowhere near as critical as they used to be when cars frequently burnt valves well before 100k miles. Also, removing the spark plugs on some vehicles can take a few hours. There is equipment that calculates compression by starter current draw but not all shops will have this, let alone a mobile buyer's check service. It is possible to hear a compression problem by disabling the car from starting and listening for a "skip" in the cranking rhythm.
A cylinder with significantly lower compression than the others will trigger a misfire code and check engine light.
Despite entrenched myth, a compression test is useless to diagnose oil burning. Bad or clogged oil control rings on the bottom of a piston either will not impact compression or can actually INCREASE compression by flooding the compression rings with oil.
Years ago, when I had a dealers license, I would legitimately sell vehicles from my residence. Even though it would be prudent for a potential buyer to have the vehicle mechanically inspected, I would not allow it. Eventually someone would just buy the vehicle after a test drive. Therefore why bother with the time and effort involved with a mechanical inspection.
Some private sellers may have the same point of view, why bother with a mechanical inspection if its not necessary to eventually sell the vehicle?
To get what the car is worth, which might not happen with a seller naive enough to go along with your terms.
Also it protects you from complaints that you covered something up if the car passes a pre-purchase inspection.
In my experience the seller just comes along. And I've made an appointment ahead of time.
Also have already established that I'm a serious buyer before that. Taken test drive and settled on price pending nothing major is found in inspection.
At my shop we discourage or prevent the seller coming along because we have had some that are constantly in our way and try to micro-manage how the inspection is performed. If test the clutch for slippage they try to teach me how to drive a standard, for one example. Another time I was showing the prospective buyer obvious collision damage and the seller went into an argumentative temper tantrum.
Here's the other side of the picture: we refer people to a salesman at a local Honda dealership who has great integrity and does not want to knowingly have his name on selling somebody a piece of crap. He has a porter drop off the car with instructions to "Fit it in whenever you can and let me know when to have the porter come get it. Today, tomorrow its all good!" We work it into the schedule and call him whenever we are done. We call the customer, take a CC# and e-mail him the report. This dealership's used cars are well-screened so maybe 95% of the time our report is favorable with possibly a couple of minor things that the dealership takes care of and our positive buyer's check results in a sale. We have never received any negative feedback from either the purchaser or the dealership over these inspections and this salesman get 2-3 sales/month from them. This is how the pre-purchase inspection process should work but all too often does not.
Don in Austin
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