Posted inInvesting / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

The Secret to Buying a 300K Mile Car

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

I’ve bought more than one vehicle from the Internet.  Sometimes through car sales sites and other times on eBay auctions.  People always ask me “How can you know you aren’t getting a pile of junk?”  It is pretty easy.  My real question to them is “Why aren’t you buying on-line?”  You still pay the vehicle tax for your area when you register it so it isn’t like you are taking textbooks from children or cops off the street.

Vehicles I’ve bought on-line fall into two categories.  Nice cars and old Jeeps.  Old Jeeps are project vehicles.  I only look at XJ Jeeps with 4.0 motors or Grand Wagoneers with the AMC 360 V8 engine. 

Currently I only have one XJ which I hardly get to drive.  Not because it doesn’t run but because I travel out of state for months on end.  You have to immerse yourself in the culture of old Jeeps before buying one, and you have to like working on a vehicle.  NO!  I’m not interested in any more project vehicles.  I don’t have the time and haven’t finished my shed.  It still needs sub-floor heating, insulation, central air compressor and most importantly a BendPak frame lift.  Some day I will get it done, but no time soon.

Finding a car which will run 300K

Finding a car which will run 300K without major repairs is quite easy.  Here are the steps:

  1. Log on to at least three but preferably five car sales Web sites like AutoTrader.com, Cars.com, etc.
  2. Choose a make and model you are interested in.  Update the search results to include “any distance” and vehicles over 200,000 miles. (some sites only have over 100,000 as an option.)
  3. Sort your search results, if any, by highest mileage.
  4. Create a text file with text editor or word processor or spreadsheet.  Make note of how many you find for each model year with north of 250,000 miles on them.
  5. Repeat the above step a few times per week for 3-5 weeks because cars come and go.
  6. Sort your list by count.

The model year with the most entries is the one you should be interested in.

Once you’ve identified the model, next is year and lower miles

If that model year isn’t quite new enough for you move down the list until you get a new enough model year which has had quite a few high mileage units for sale.

Now you need to do your actual vehicle search for that make/model/year and the lowest miles/price ratio you can find.

Just now I did a quick search for Toyota Avalon 2000-2015 vehicles north of 200,000 miles and priced $11K and under on AutoTrader.com.  It shows 52 vehicles matching my criteria.  Years 2000-2006 seem to be pretty well represented on the first page of results.  I’m not looking for another Avalon right now.  I picked a 2006 up not long ago.  Bought it on-line while I was on the left coast and picked it up a bit over a week later when I got home.

What have I had to do?

  • I put brake rotors on it.  Some fool put brand new brake pads on without replacing rotors.
  • I had a 4-wheel alignment done.  Probably the same fool put brand new tires on and didn’t do an alignment.
  • Put Toyota mud flaps on it (I live rural).
  • I have ordered some new floor mats and a cargo net.  Will put the new floor mats in next spring when the worst of the mud is over.  What is in there is fine for now.

How many miles were on it?  115K  Just broken in.  From the look of the interior this was someone’s child. It will easy run to 300K if I keep the oil changed.

One note:

The seats looked like they had never been sat it when I went to pick it up.  This was a rare pleasure.  Leather seats _always_ look far better in pictures taken with cell phone cameras or any other source using a resolution which loads quickly on the Internet.  Most people are too lazy to buy leather cream and apply it twice per year.  Most people are too cheap to pay a detailing shop to put leather cream on the seats twice per year FROM NEW.  If you are lucky they might use some of that spray on stuff, but they will wait until the seats are showing creases/cracks.

Spray on leather treatment is an apply weekly thing, not a twice per year thing.  Even the manufacturers which make both cream and spray will tell you in their advertising the cream is seriously concentrated.  I’m telling you this because you will need to put the cream on day one, not the spray on stuff.  No matter how good the seats look, you need to use the cream to help keep them soft.

Nothing you can do for cloth

There is nothing you can do for cloth seats.  Other than maybe getting an automotive shampooer to take a few stains out, wear is wear.  If leather isn’t too far gone the cream will bring it back.  Might take several applications a few weeks apart, but if they weren’t gone to the point of already splitting/ripping, they will get soft.  If the seats have already split or ripped through just use the cheap spray because they aren’t coming back.  It spent too much time in the sun and had too much neglect.

Hopefully you’ve paid attention and learned the negative lesson as well as the positive.  What’s the negative lesson?  If the car you are interested in doesn’t have any units for sale with north of 250K miles on them, give up on that model, it is not a keeper.

Related post:

The Ever Shrinking Definition of Full Size

https://www.theminimumyouneedtoknow.com/agile_book.html

For more useful insights on technology and life itself, please take a look at my latest title, The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of AGILE.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.