Buying a car at auction

vax2002

Take a bit of frayed rope, tie it round the front towing eye or bumper, watch the horror as it goes in !

mikey72

s_b wrote: »

you just have a chip on your shoulder im afraid
ive haddock with you:D

MSE website, comsumer rights, or used car dealers profits?

Guess which side I'm on.

Wig

IME you will pay (at auction) approximately the same as what you will be able to source on autotrader.

IOW If you have time on your hands buy from autotrader where you can spend as long as you want test driving and inspecting it

If you don't have time then auction can be good, but you had better have a good eye and know what to look for and you generally only have 3 or 4 mins to inspect the car internally before you have to start bidding.

http://www.gaarde.org/acronyms/?lookup=I

EdGasket

Auctions used to be great (30 years ago). Keys were left in the ignition, you could start them up, lift the bonnet, take as long as you liked looking round. Most came with a description of all the major components and their condition. If anything was misrepresented, you could reject the car within 2 hours of the auction end. There was no so called 'buyers premium'.
Nowdays auctions are a waste of time. Cars locked, no keys, Sold as seen (even really expensive ones), and stupid buyers premium; as if the auction wasn't taking money from the seller already. It's for dealers only now I'm afraid.

andygb

Wig wrote: »

IME you will pay (at auction) approximately the same as what you will be able to source on autotrader.

Nothing wrong with auctions, I have bought loads of cars there, including my current Mondeo (bought seven years ago with 27K on the clock, now has 123K on the clock, never let us down, been all over Europe)
Auctions are much cheaper for everything except Golf GTis and Corsas.

liam8282

I was tempted to buy a car from the auctions and I did go along to a few to get the feel of them.

At my local auction if you get there early they give you the keys and let you open the car, start it up and give it a good all round general check.

The only thing that put me off was, after going to the auctions for a few weeks, I could see the same cars going through and it was the auction houses cars or people associated with the auction house (I don't know quite how it worked). But anyway, they bid the prices up on them, rather like shill bidding on ebay, and if it doesn't get the price they want for it, it goes straight back into the next auction.

To be fair though, I ended up buying a car privately and ended up having to replace the clutch, cambelt and water pump in a matter of months. Would probably have been better off going to the auctions after all.

TrickyWicky

I went to an auction once, I could see loads of dealer type people drooling over certain cars and others that were completely ignored. In all it was like a financial frenzy with a bit of metal in the mix. There were some nice cars there without a doubt but there was no opportunity to examine them properly. IT put me right off to be honest and its not somewhere I'd go to find a car really.

I prefer to do my research, find a few cars that meet my needs, research them all, find out what weakpoints they all have, how to detect them, how much to repair them etc. Then its a case of picking the faults you'd prefer to have over the ones you'd prefer not to have.

That said, sometimes you'll get lucky and find a car that suits you perfectly, has a bullet proof engine and gearbox and will give you many years of hassle free motoring at a really good purchase price. IF you're not in a hurry to purchase a car and don't mind doing a bit of research then your efforts really can pay dividends.

Wig

andygb wrote: »

Nothing wrong with auctions, I have bought loads of cars there, including my current Mondeo (bought seven years ago with 27K on the clock, now has 123K on the clock, never let us down, been all over Europe)
Auctions are much cheaper for everything except Golf GTis and Corsas.

I have also bought virtually all my cars at auction, but every one of them was at a price that I could have sourced on autotrader.....If I had the time and the inclination to wait for one to pop up.

You only have to look at cap cln prices add on the buyers commision and you will see for most cars this amounts to what you will find on autotrader.

I only use auction when autotrader does not have what I want at the price that I want it for.....i.e. the price I will get it at auction....

jase1

I would say that auctions are only worth it if you get something for £500-1000 less than you would have paid at a reasonable dealership. That way you have money aside for any problems it has.

Problem is that at £1000 in the first place you don't have that luxury.

Just buy something unglamorous on a private sale.

For all the bad press it got, I found Autoquake to be the way to go. Big choice of cars at similar price to auction and you got to drive them before buying (if you lived anywhere near Leeds) so a lot safer if not as good as a real dealer. Gone now though.

mikey72

If I don't buy privately, I buy from car supermarkets. Every car is exactly as you expect, I always have a test drive, and have never had a bad one yet.