Both Maire Anne and I loved this car. We didn't buy it new, but it was the newest, lowest mileage car we'd ever owned. It was our first post-minivan. Two of our three kids were out of the house. It took a little convincing of Maire Anne that she no longer needed a minivan's seating for seven, but once she drove the go-cart little 5-speed Fit Sport, she was hooked.
We bought it in 2009. Fuel had shot up to $4.50/gallon. The folks who owned it had a big SUV whose fuel bills were eating them alive. They bought the Fit and parked the SUV. The wife swore she'd drive a stick. She never warmed to it. Then, gas prices fell, they returned to driving their SUV, and sold the Fit to us.
The combination of the Fit's four doors, hatchback, and the car's "magic seats" (a very low flat floor coupled with seats that also folded very flat) made for a remarkably flexible interior configuration. For Maire Anne's Bugworks business, she carries a set of stackable plastic containers perhaps half as high as a file cabinet, and they have to be kept upright. We used to bungie cord them in the rear of my BMW wagon. But, as it turns out, one of the Fit's seating configurations allows you to fold one side of the rear bench seat up, exposing the floor and creating a space just the right size to hold the bug box without needing to strap it in. She instantly loved it. Sometimes you can't research or predict the things you'll find the most useful or engaging.
The Fit was everything you'd expect a Honda product to be. Absolutely nothing went wrong in 60,000 miles. And it was just a blast to drive. I don't like big heavy cars. I like small, light, and snappy. And the Fit Sport 5-speed was all that. We both loved it. Maire Anne would often say that if anything happened to the car, she'd want another one just like it.
And then, without warning, it was gone.
The insurance company gave us what I thought was a fair settlement -- $8300 including sales tax. Following Maire Anne's wishes, I immediately began looking for another. I quickly found what was as close to the same car as possible -- a silver 2008 Fit Sport 5-speed, 48,000 miles, at a local Lexus dealer, asking price $9800. I thought I was done. I showed the ad to Maire Anne. Her eyes welled up. "I can't buy another one the same color," she said. Heard and understood.
Okay, if it's not this Fit, then we enter "The Process." Now, there are basically two ways to buy a car. There's the way I imagine most normal people do it, which is they wait until they need a car, then go into a dealership and come out several hours later with an actual car that they can actually drive home and actually use later that day. At least I assume that's how it's done.
Of course, that's not what I do. I embark on a long and torturous process that involves solving partial differential equations for constrained extrema in my head and reading the entrails of a goat to find the knee in the curve of price, mileage, and distance. That is, local cars are incredibly convenient, you can go look at them and bring something home easily, but if a car is truly a smoking deal or if it's got a particularly rare option package but it's a thousand miles away, you figure out how to make it happen.
eBay, AutoTrader, cars.com, and craigslist were all brought into The Process. Initially I looked at buying what the insurance check would roughly pay for, but I allowed a certain amount of mission and price creep and began looking at lower mileage cars for more money. After all, the purchase and ownership of our Fit went perfectly. The idea of another trouble-free five years with one of our cars was damned appealing.
I found what seemed to be The Car -- a 2012 Gen2 Fit (they were redesigned in 2009, and again in 2014), right here in Newton. A red base model Fit (not a sport) 5-speed with 27k for an asking price of $11,900. I felt certain I'd buy it on the spot. I checked it out. The seller said he'd take $11,500 for it. But when I drove it... meh. It didn't have the snap that ours had.
I went home and did a ton of reading. The Gen2s are about 4" longer than the Gen1 Fits, so you do lose a little of the short wheelbase snappiness, but in general, people weren't complaining about it. In fact, most reviews seemed to feel the Gen1 cars (2007 and 2008) were a bit buzzy, and the Gen2 cars (2009 through 2014) were quieter and slightly more refined without losing any of the fun. I wondered if the difference I felt wasn't Gen2 versus Gen1 but instead was Sport versus Base. I spent a delightfully anal retentive hour online looking at Honda parts catalogs and figured out that, in terms of suspension, the base and Sport Fits shared the front springs and sway bar, but that was all. The Sport had different rear springs, different shocks and struts, and a rear sway bar where the base had none. And larger wheels and tires. Plus, other non-handling things like much better seats, a much better sound system, and rugs instead of rubber floor mats. And the front and rear spoilers and the side cladding. I resolved to get us another Fit Sport.
When you do these nationwide searches, you find that many of the cars, particularly the ones on Autotrader and cars.com, are at dealerships. You can look at dealer reviews online and check out BBB ratings and factor that into your calculus. I'm a pretty understanding guy. When I see reviews like "we bought this beautiful BMW with 80,000 miles and six weeks later it was leaking coolant everywhere and they wouldn't stand behind it these guys are just awful," I think what the hell did you THINK would happen with a BMW with 80k on it - a used car dealer isn't responsible for that unless you bought an extended warranty through them. And awful dealer reviews don't necessarily cross a car off my list, particularly if the car is out of warranty and has a rare option package I desire. But when you read ten reviews that say "we drove for six hours to pick up a car we had a deposit on but when we got there they'd sold it and tried to sell us something different," that's a pretty clear big flashing red light if the car you're interested in is 500 miles away.
And then there's the whole Carfax / salvage title thing. On sites like Autotrader and cars.com, many but not all dealerships post the Carfax so you can see the title is clean. But then you'll see a car priced 20% less than others with comparable mileage, and there's no Carfax. So you order it (I have someone I found online to whom I pay $5 a whack for Carfaxes) and find out that, of course, the car had been totaled and now has a rebuilt title. Now, this in and of itself isn't necessarily a reason to reject a car (much more on this below). But the fact that it wasn't disclosed and you had to hunt for it is, in my book, an automatic fail. If the dealer wasn't candid enough to admit the car has a rebuilt title, you're very unlikely to find out what the reason was for the salvage title in the first place. Hail or theft damage, maybe not a big deal. Flood damage, you're assuming a boatload (heh) of risk.
But I kept looking. I made a spreadsheet of cars, their VINs, the mileage, price, color, how far away they were, and the reputation of the dealership so I could keep it all straight.
And then, on Thursday April 2nd, I stumbled into a blue 2013 Honda Fit Sport 5-speed on eBay with 9,317 miles for an asking price of $10,999. That was a very appealing set of parameters. But a) it was in Charlotte NC, not easy to run and look at, and b) it had a rebuilt salvage title. However, the seller freely admitted it had a salvage title, and the original damage seemed minor. You can still see the auction here:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/141622846264?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT
The seller had a business rebuilding salvage cars. He said that the car had been hit in the left front wheel and suffered no body damage.
The mileage and cost were incredibly appealing, so I began to look more into the whole salvage thing. It seems to work like this.
If a car has an insurance claim against it for more than 3/4 of its value, the insurance company will declare it a total loss. This is the origin of the phrase "totaling a car." But, these days, it's damned easy for a car to reach that threshold, particularly if it's an inexpensive car. Folks tell me that any front end impact that bends sheet metal, messes up the suspension, and blows the airbags is generally enough to do it. But cars are also totaled due to theft, vandalism, hail, water damage, and other reasons. The point is, the scarlet "S" is issued on the basis of some insurance adjuster's judgment of the ratio of the cost of the repairing the damage to the value of the car, not on the basis of whether the car is "repairable" in any absolute sense. The car is then sold by the insurance company. When it is sold, it is issued a salvage title. Salvage cars are advertised on web sites like salvagebid.com which typically list a gross classification of the reason the car is there ("front collision," "burn," "recovered theft," "flood," etc) and walk-around photographs of the car. Businesses and individuals may then bid on and buy the salvage car and repair the damage.
Once a salvaged car is repaired, it is inspected (and the mechanism for inspection varies state-to-state; in some states, the inspection is reportedly only to verify that no stolen parts were used in the reconstruction) and given a "rebuilt" or "reconstructed" title. This in and of itself appears to be the source of much confusion. It's reported online that you can't register and insure a car with a salvage title. That's probably true. When it has a salvage title, it's typically a wrecked undrivable unroadworthy piece of crap. But the point is that when people say salvage car or salvage title, they usually mean former salvage car and former salvage title. You can register and insure a car with a rebuilt title.
I called my insurance company to be certain. They said that there was no problem insuring a car with a rebuilt title for collision and comp. The only caveat is that they require an insurance inspection. I asked my agent "so there is risk in this, right? What happens if I buy the car, have it shipped up here, and it fails this inspection? She said "this isn't an inspection you can fail." As she explained it, I realized it was the same insurance inspection I used to need to go through whenever I bought and insured any car for collision and comp -- it's so the insurance company can make sure there are no dented body panels, bashed bumpers, cracked glass, etc, before issuing the policy.
Then, I called PenFed (Pentagon Federal Credit Union, from whom I've had bank loans for cars before) and asked them if they'd issue a loan on a car with a rebuilt title. They said yes, but there was a cap -- they'd loan up to 50% of the book value. They looked up the book on a 2013 Fit Sport with 9317 miles. It was about $17k, so they'd loan up to $8500. I wasn't certain I wanted a loan, but I now knew it was possible.
So, neither insurance nor a loan were showstoppers. I began to look very carefully at 2013 Fit Sport. Well, as carefully as one can look when one isn't there.
I like to think that my web kung fu is quite good, and sometimes it is. The things you can find out simply by searching for a car's VIN (or for a seller's phone number, for that matter) are often astounding. Of course, sometimes you simply get lucky. In my case, when I searched for Fit's VIN, up immediately popped web sites that showed the car when it was being sold as a salvage car (in other words, showing the expired auction). The luck was that the car had very recently been a salvage car. For you web geeks, google still hit on them, and you could still see the original postings through the cache. In any case, this allowed me to see the damage before the car was repaired. And it looked really minor; the only outward damage was the left front wheel and the body sideskirt just behind it. It looked like the car had perhaps slid into a curb. I wondered why it had been totaled. Here's the good profile of the car.
And here's the bad. You can see the damage to the left front wheel.
Here's a slightly zoomed in pic of the left front wheel. If you look carefully you can also see that the left side cladding is slightly pulled away from the body. Again, incredibly minor.
On the salvage web site, I also saw this description below , referring to damage to the undercarriage and front end. I noted, positively, that it didn't list anything about flood damage.
I asked the eBay seller about the additional damage, and I liked his answer.
Sorry, i should be more specific. Wheel, tire and knee (lower control arm, strut and knuckle) assembly were replaced on this car. Knee was replaced to make sure there are no compromised/damaged parts left over. Alignment was performed as well and car is in great running condition and goes perfectly straight now. As you've seen the pictures most likely you know how little the damage was. There was nothing damaged on the bottom, car did run and drive fine even with the damaged parts. Don't know time difference in your area so please call me when you get a chance. My cell is XXX-XXX-XXXX and my name is Atanas Dinev at Chalev's rebuildables, but you can call me Nasko.
I asked him about the minimal amount of damage totaling the car.
yes, i'm amazed myself sometimes as well how come they totaled those cars with such small damages but i guess it's all up to the insurance companies. Not sure if you've seen correct pictures but i'll attach exact pics of the damage the way i got the car - again, run and drive, no blown air bags, no mechanical issues, etc... few dents/scratches around but nothing out of ordinary.
Hmmn.
Two year old Fit Sport 5-speed. 9317 miles. $11,000. If it were local, I'd go look at it and drive it, and if I didn't see anything wrong, I'd probably buy it on the spot. But it's 850 miles away.
So how do you do this? Do you go look at it and drive it? There are non-stop flights from Boston to Charlotte as low as $299 round trip, but those low prices usually require a ten day lead time. It was Thursday. Booking a round-trip flight for the weekend to look at the car, maybe even buy it and drive it home and eat the round-trip leg of the ticket would've been nearly $700. Or do you take the risk and buy it sight unseen?
I posted the car on Facebook for advice, and got generally very positive responses. "I buy former salvaged cars all the time," one friend said. "If the repairer is candid, it's often a more transparent transaction than buying a wholesaled car where any history is intentionally thrown away." "Badly damaged cars are fixed all the time, and lightly damaged cars are declared as salvage cars all the time," said another. "There are very few firm lines that would make it not safely fixable, especially considering how light the damage looks." "As long as it wasn't a flood car." And, maybe my favorite, "people talk about taking a big hit in resale value because the salvage history stays with the title forever. That's true, but you only take a hit if a) you pay too much for it when you buy it and b) you sell it too soon. If you buy a salvage car cheaply and drive them into the ground, there's no hit."
I began to think "I'm going to to this."
And then I learned something that almost scotched the whole thing. Nearly every manufacturer states, right on their web site, that if a car has been declared a salvage vehicle at any point in its life, the manufacturer's warranty is null and void. They're still on the hook for recalls and federally-mandated warranties like the 80,000 mile / 8 year coverage of the catalytic converter, ECU (computer) and other elements of the emissions control system, but there's no taking it into the dealer for free because the check engine light comes on. Or, far worse, if it lunches an engine.
It seemed like a showstopper.
And then, when I thought about it very carefully, the answer was surprising..
What is the warranty on a 2013 Honda Fit? 3 year / 36,000 miles basic warranty, plus 5 year / 60,000 miles on the power train.
How much of this warranty is left on other Fits I'm looking at? Basically, none. For completeness, here's a table of the cars I was looking at.
| Location | Model | year | mileage | color | price |
| Manhasset NY | Fit | 2007 | 36164 | white | $8,995 |
| Philadelphia | Fit Sport | 2008 | 39000 | black | $12,000 |
| Canton | Fit Sport | 2009 | 37491 | peaberry | $10,971 |
| Laconia | Fit Sport | 2010 | 28000 | silver | $12,995 |
| Newton | Fit | 2012 | 28750 | red | $11,500 |
| Charlotte | Fit Sport | 2013 | 9390 | blue | $10,999 |
In the price range I'm looking, most of the cars are older than 2012. For any of those, the 3 year warranty is gone. For a 2012 car... the warranty starts when a car is "put in service," which usually means "sold" but can also mean "began being used as a dealer demonstrator." If a car was put in service anytime before April, the three year warranty would be gone. Best case, if it was put in service in December, the warranty would run through December 2015, so there would be no more than nine months left. By similar calculations, if I looked at another 2013 car, there could be between eight months and a year and nine months of the warranty left. But every other 2013 car was out of my price range.
So, if I ruled out the rebuilt 2013 Fit Sport simply because the warranty was void, it didn't make sense, because I'd likely buy a different Fit, for more money, with tens of thousands more miles, that had little or none of the basic warranty left on it anyway.
Okay, Well, how about the 5 year / 60,000 mile power train warranty? What's that worth? Well, how much went wrong with our last Honda Fit Sport? Nothing. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a bloody thing in 60,000 miles. Is anything likely to go wrong with the VTEC engine and the 5-speed gearbox? No. And there's a similar issue regarding how much of the warranty would still be in existence anyway. Looking at the table above, we see that, of these, only the 2012 Fit in Newton had anything left of either the basic or the power train warranty left. (Okay, the 2010 car might have had half a year of the power train warranty.)
So, like with the basic warranty, the lack of a power train warranty wasn't the make-or-break issue I thought it would be.
And, yes, the fact that it's a Honda product factored into this big time, at least with me. I did look up frequency of repair information on Gen2 Fits on Consumer Reports, RepairPal, CarComplaints and Fit enthusiast forums just to see if there were any gotchas. The only thing that showed up of any concern to me was the short life of the car's tiny battery. Many people reported leaving the radio or dome light on for 1/2 an hour and coming back to a dead battery. We'd actually had this happen with our Gen1 Fit as well. The easy solution is fitting a slightly larger battery.
The more I thought about it, the salvage issue was less a warranty issue or a value-of-the-car issue than it was an overall risk issue. Unless I flew down to look at it, I had no way to know how the car ran and drove. I had no way to know how "correctly" it was repaired. And let's be honest -- while I can put a car up on my lift and look underneath it for gross deficiencies, to know really how well repaired it was, I'd really need to take it to an expert with a frame jig and laser alignment tools.
I thought about the several BMW 2002tiis I'd lost out on during the past year because I was trying to get additional documentation to reduce risk and other people moved quicker than I did and grabbed them. In fact, it was now Monday April 6th. I'd already dithered away four days researching all this and thinking it through. Many people were watching the auction but no one had pounced.
It was time to make a move.
And, quickly, it all came into focus. I needed to assign a value to the risk so I could think about it as risk versus reward. Somehow the number I came up with was $2500. In my mind, this was the cost of risk of the rebuilt car as compared to the "safe" red base Fit in Newton, the one with 27k miles for $11,500. In other words, if I'd pay $11.5k for the red base Fit in Newton, then I'd want to pay $2500 less than that, or $9000, for the rebuilt Fit Sport in Charlotte. This also, in my mind, factored in the cost of shipping the car up from Charlotte to Boston, which was estimated on eBay's UShip calculator as low as $538 (much more on this later).
So that was the answer. Offer the guy nine grand.
So, I sent him a lengthy email, explaining what I laid out above, and using specific examples of other nearby cars, including the red one, so the seller could see I had options.
Those who know me know that this thought process -- decide on what a car is worth to you, be as dispassionate about it as possible, add in some wiggle room because you don't want to lose a car you really want over the last $500, make the offer, if the seller says yes, great, but if the seller says no, also great, because you've thought it through -- is almost a patented Rob Siegel technique. I've done very well dealing with cars (and other things in my life this way), because it lets me go back and look at the decision and how it was made, and say "nah, I wouldn't have paid that." But, as I said, the deliberative nature of the process has made me lose out on cars to people who move faster.
In this case, I did something additional that was crucial. The eBay auction for the Fit had a "make an offer" button. In addition to sending the guy the e-mail offering him nine grand and explaining why, I officially submitted an offer of nine grand through the eBay auction. This showed that I was serious, that it was a real offer (if he accepted it through eBay, I was legally bound to follow through with it) and I was not just throwing out low numbers.
Within five minutes, Nasko (the seller) replied:
Rob, without going into any details how much it cost me, comparisons, that i wanted to get around $10-10.5k etc... let's make it $9500 and it's yours... i believe this is fair deal and will make us both happy. let me know if you want it and i'll lower down BuyItNow for you to $9500 to proceed with purchase or you can just come and get it or whatever is best for you. let me know.
I called Maire Anne, we talked it through, and concurred. I messaged Nasko "yes," then sat at my computer and hit the refresh button until the auction showed a $9500 BIN (don't want someone else to grab it at that price), and punched it.
So, on April 6th, we bought a 2013 Honda Fit Sport 5-speed with 9317 miles for $9500. Note that this is only a thousand dollars more than what PenFed Credit Union said was half the book value of the car.
I then needed to pay for and retrieve the car. We'll cover that in the next installment.
Interesting read. Where's the rest of the Fit story?
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