In alot of states any vehicle over 10yrs old is mileage exempt..tht is a somwhat normal practice..

Carfax or Auto Check would pick up salvage history for sure...

you cant wash away salvage nowadays, like you could years ago, so i wouldnt be worried bout that either....

 

Having been involved with the automobile retail business for 30 years I can tell you that ALL of these guides are just that, a guide. Many are based on dealers self reporting of their retail sales and due to the built-in bias they are the most suspect. Others are loosely based on regional auction wholesale averages and are somewhat more accurate but still shouldn't be used as gospel.

A dealer is somewhat constrained by what the market will bear but even that has little effect when you're talking about relatively low production number vehicles. Individuals sell from the heart most often and will normally feel that THEIR car is a special case for a number of reasons that don't much matter to the normal buyer but do dictate the asking price. The bottom line is that the best deal is most often described as the one which both the seller and the buyer can live with at the end of the day as opposed to being measured against some rather arbitrary figure arrived at by averaging the prior weeks 20 auction sales across the entire country. I've spent hours in those very same auto auction lanes and can attest to the sometimes stupidly low or high prices that can happen on any given day.

If you find a vehicle, Jag or other, that meets or exceeds your major criteria at a price you can afford even if it is higher then a book price or a friends supposedly identical purchase buy it and don't look back.

 

There is a glaring loophole in the CarFax reports in that there are no insurance company reports for the vast number of automobiles that are owned by the self-insured fleets. That means that a former rental car can have substantial crash damage that has been repaired with nary a paper trail that CarFax can follow. This would be applicable to any large self-insured organization that maintains any type of rental or lease fleet.

While handy, CarFax and others are not infallible.

 

That is very true for a 'Documented Salvage'. But, as I know for fact, not all vehicles have been salvaged through DMV and Documented. The dealer I worked for had vehicles with water lines all the way up to the middle of the doors. They would pressure wash them out and sell them as a normal used car. I don't know how they bought these vehicles, or who was selling them to him, but it was extremely obvious they were flood vehicles. My boss would literally say that if it's not on CarFax, then it never happened. He would also do major body work to vehicles in his own shop and never claim them on insurance or DMV. Of course, he's out of business now, thank goodness, but I know of another local shop that does all it's own body repairs in a building near the dealership, and I'm POSITIVE the repairs are valued at more than $500 (The cost you are supposed to report to DMV). Many have had the complete front or rear-ends replaced.

So, while CarFax probably does not miss a 'Documented Salvage', it's the undocumented ones that one needs to worry about.