These are some tips on how to properly buy a cheap used car, or just a fun beater.
My first general suggestion is for you to go to your local scrap yard and see what they have the most of. Consider buying one of those makes/models of cars. Get a manual for it, but don’t bother doing a job that costs more than the car is worth.
The car should start with a turn of the key, not with a bunch of pumping and primping. You should not smell gas before or after you start it. There should be no soot around the tail pipe. Drive at 25 to 30 mph try to find an incline to cruise up the tranny should not be slipping in and out of gear. Under normal acceleration it should not shift hard enough to snap your head back. Expect to buy a new battery and do a tune up and don’t expect great tires.
Aways sniff over car in daylight. Night is the lying bastard’s friend.
Carry a screw driver and check the important bits of the chassis for serious corrosion. Sill, chassis members, door pillars and any areas that are critical to the integrity of the passenger cell should you hit something. Suspension mounts corrode without being noticed, get on your knees and check where the bouncy bits join to the chassis/shell. Brake and fuel lines should not be that bad on that vintage of car. If they are heavily corroded walk away or budget for replacement. Brake disks should not have deep scoring (concentric rings more than 0.5mm deep) on them. Beware of rumbling noises from wheels in a straight line. Bearings mostly and they need replacing if noisy. If it rumbles when front wheels are turned it could also be CV joints and other expensive nasties. Check the spare tire as well as the road wheels for condition and pressure. Good sign if it is fit and to the right pressures. One sided wear patterns on tires are not a good sign.
Check that all the locks open with the key in your hand and have not been forced. Check all the numbers on the registration documents against those on VIN plate and chassis plate and engine. Accept no excuses, if they differ walk away.
Electrics: Keep it simple, the more electrical doodads there are, the more there is to go wrong and the last thing you want to do is try to trace a fault on 15 year old electrics that have been bodged by someone even more neanderthal than yourself. If you should come accross a car with bodged electrics, run away. Do not buy it at a cheap price thinking you got a bargain. Signs of the bodge artist are insulating tape, cheap connectors, hanging wires in interior or engine bay and loose/flapping interior trim panels and carpets where they have been butchered to get at electrics or run badly installed ICE. Get to know your ignition system. Love and care for it as you would a newborn and it will reward you. Check ALL the lights.
Make sure you let the engine cool down, check everything else on the car before you bother starting it. Pop the hood first and check and see if it’s warm. Warmth can indicate sneaky owner. Beware sneaky people. Check coolant, should not be brown and horrible looking and be to correct level. Open oil filler cap and shine a flashlight (you did bring one didn’t you?) into the black hole and look for white gunge. If said white gunge is present walk away. Oil should be sweet smelling and not burnt to crisp. If the word sludge comes to mind then beat the owner for their lack of mechanical sympathy and walk away. Before and after starting and driving the oil should not be like molassas or smell like burnt gas.
Check the transmission oil, it should be red not brown.
If, when you start it, blue smoke emanates from the rear of the vehicle like a smokestack, walk away. If it smokes a little and then is okay when warm then the piston rings are near death and require replacing. If it keeps smoking when warm then the valve guides have probably gone and that can be terminally expensive.
General rule of thumb is that if that noise sounds expensive to you, it probably will be.
Have someone else drive the car down the street while you watch it directly from behind. If it looks like it’s going a teeny bit sideways, it’s dog-tracking. That means it’s been in a serious accident and the frame/unibody wasn’t properly straightened.
A good clutch check is to put it in 5th on a hill at highway speeds and punch it. If the speedo and engine revs get out of sync at all, you’ve got slippage.
If it’s a rear wheel drive car, put it in drive and then quickly into reverse. Repeat that several times. If you hear or feel a clunk, you may have a problem transmission or u-joint. U-joints are cheap, but still an expense.
Put your foot solidly on the brake with the car in gear, and use the other foot to try to rev the engine. If you feel the motor “jumping,” it needs new motor mounts. If the engine revs up, the car needs a new clutch.
If possible, jack up the front end so the tires are off the ground. Grab the tire at the 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock points. Try to shake it. If you can hear or feel a clunking, or if there’s significant movement, you have worn tie rod ends. Do likewise at the 12 and 6 points. Any noise or movement means worn out ball joints (on rear wheel drive cars).
If the owner will allow you to do so, and if you have the tools, pull the spark plugs. The deposit on them should be tannish. Very black plugs or plugs with a white-ish glaze are signs of timing or carb/injector problems. And, with most cars on the road having electronic control over those two issues, repairs could be expensive. If the plugs have shiney black deposits, the car is burning oil.
Check the depth of the tread on the tires. If it looks shallow, take a penny and insert with Lincoln’s head (sorry, Abe) into the tread. You shouldn’t be able to see any of the coin above his head. This may be an obvious test for you, but not everyone knows how to check for worn tires. (BTW, used tires are a great bargain).
If a large rear wheel drive car that gets 22 mpg is OK with you, then I suggest taking a look at used state police cars, Crown Victoria only, sold at auction. They are well kept and sold at about one third of the expected life span. They are usually good for 250K to 350K miles and are usually sold at about 130K miles.
The town and county cars are not usually kept as well but generally state police cars are very well kept. I think every state has a police interceptor auction or sales time each year or more than once a year. They are known as CVPI = Crown Victoria Police Interceptors
The prices run, usually, $800 to $2000. They aren’t faster than normal Crown Vics, but are more sturdy.
Also, you will find that there are about ten bazillion cars that are virtually identical. The Crown Vic, Mercury Grand Marquis, Lincoln Town Car, etc. will use all the same parts (well, the important stuff, anyway), so you should have no problem locating replacements for anything that has failed or fails down the road.
One thing with police cars: INSPECT THE BRAKES. You’ll probably end up doing a brake job the day you get it. I had three friends in high school who drove these cars, and all three of them needed a brake job right away. I would recommend doing that yourself, as the parts will not be terribly expensive. I suppose the nature of police work is hard on brakes.
I would definitely look for a car with a manual transmission. Automatics don’t last forever and you can expect to pay $1500 -$2000 for a rebuild. Clutches, OTOH, are much cheaper. If you’re handy you can replace a clutch yourself in a day or two for a couple hundred bucks, but automatics need big $$$ to have rebuilt by a professional. Don’t forget to check the condition of the tires. A set of decent tires will cost at least $200 if the car needs them.
Things like brakes, shocks, and springs are easy to replace, and if those things are bad on the car you’re looking at, you have a good bargaining tool.
I would stay away from BMW, they are nice cars but very expencive to fix. Do not get a german car, parts are $$$. Jap cars are also expensive on parts, but don’t need them as often usually.
Domestics are the best bet in my humble opinion, cheapest parts and lots of em in junkyards to get used parts from, and also much easier to work on usually.
Any car from the big 3 (GM, Chrysler or Ford) will be cheaper to buy and the parts for them when they break are much cheaper than foreign cars.
Foreign cars like Toyota and Honda will be more expensive to buy but will usally last longer. I would stay away from older Kia’s and Hyundies, while they may be cheap to buy they usally don’t last that long.
If you’re comfortable with junkyarding, I’ve found that the best parts availability was for domestic economy cars. I went looking for parts for a ford escort once and I had about 25 possible very complete donor cars at the first junkyard. Ditto with cavaliers. S-10s and rangers are also very good, if you’re considering trucks.
Unless you care not a whit that the car will make you look like a Big, Slovenly Loser, DO NOT fool with cars with bad paint jobs. If the car is cheap just because the paint is de-laminating and flaking off, fixing it will take either a lot of money or a lot of time. A $500 dollar car is not worth painting, so make sure you can live with the color scheme. A $1500+ car can be worth it if you care about the style. If you are patient and willing to bend n’ stretch, you can do a lot of the prep work for painting a car yourself. You have to like sanding. It’ll look better every time, though, if you pay somebody who has the proper equipment and a painting booth to shoot it.
Kelly blue book means nothing, they are generally so far off its not even funny. The economy sucks, and they don’t realize it. You should have no trouble finding a ride for 500 bucks that will get you there and back, and if you have a few grand to spend you’ll do even better. Don’t be in a hurry, look around and you will find something that you like, works well and suits your wallet.
Chrysler has a lot of pluses if you pick up a used one. Find something that has the 2.2/2.5 throttle body injected engine. Manual or automatic, they’re both the same in reliability, though I’ve seen the very rare flexplate failure on the autos (takes a day and $60 to fix). Mo lighta, mo betta. Past that, *they’re all the same*. Dynasties down to Aries, the parts are darn near identical and interchangeable. Reading the owner’s manual and learning to use that lever labeled “parking brake” will prevent flex plate damage. Move the transmission into park, set the parking brake, and then take your foot off the brake pedal. Flex plate will last forever.
Why’s that important? It means you have a parts pool of several million vehicles to pull from, if you don’t want to pay, say, $15 for a water pump, $7 for a brake rotor, $90 for a crankshaft, etc.
Engine repairs cannot be simpler. When Chrysler designed this layout they made bottom end rebuilds possible with the engine in the car, and *then* they used high nickel parts and hard aluminum bearings so you won’t have to do that for.. well… I’ve never heard of one wearing the bearings out without contaminated oil, and even then it’s just a swap because the high-nickel crank is exceedingly tough and won’t scuff. TBI is a fist-sized unit right on top of the motor. Every service part is literally staring you in the face when you open the hood, save for the power steering pump and the starter, which… don’t fail. And for crying out loud, make sure the intake is on right. For some reason, people can’t get them back together correctly after changing the air filter. Chrysler likes to make intake systems that require an engineering degree to manipulate. The car will suck all the dirt and grime off the road and into the throttle body. Think blackened throttle plates… Very nasty.
One more thing about cars, especially used ones is that you need the shop manual. Go to the auto parts store and track down the Chilton or Haynes guide for your vehicle. It will walk you through almost every fix you will need on any car.
