Continuing on the Wheeler Dealers / car flipping stuff, I had the opportunity to purchase this little number:
Not bad, huh? 99 RAV4 L, 4 cyl/auto, 2WD. Leather, moonroof, A/C, PW/PDL/PS, etc.
The interior was even half-decent:
Except for one little niggle...
That's mold on the glass, a sure sign up here that not only does the car park outside in the winter, but that it also is parked in the exact same direction every day, and rarely, if ever, washed.
A much closer inspection reveals a car you should run away from as if it was packed with agent orange. Shall we?
Starting with the wheels:
At the end of the pen, you can see some funny looking white scratches. That is aluminum corrosion. Basically, it's rust for aluminum. It's a strong indicator that the car was never washed and often spent time with brake dust on it's wheels (which accelerates corrosion).
Further inspection shows that although it has matching tires, they have uneven wear and two different styles of valve stem. A cursory look in the glove box reveals the dreaded wad of yellow, meaning this owner took the car to the cheapest discount chain in the region and bought 2 tires at a time and never an alignment or rotation.
While we are down there, we notice some missing fasteners on the bumper. This is a warning sign of potential collision history.
Further inspection of the front bumper reveals a bad spot of orange peel in the paint and clearcoat. This could either be sun/weather damage and/or a flaw in the respray from a sub-standard repair.
This is not isolated to a single spot, either. The whole bumper is showing signs of an extremely poor repair.
The rear bumper is a little more disturbing. That's silver overspray in the reflectors. The body shop didn't bother to remove the reflectors, just masked them, and the paint went through the seals and got inside the lens.
Here we have a nasty hole and crack in a taillight. (You did notice the nearly-new headlights earlier too, right?) This is a very unusual place to have damage like this and is most likely from a rear-end collision that was incompletely repaired.
Up top we can see a "sunburn". This is where the clearcoat is burned completely through from sitting outside in the weather and not being regularly protected (wash and wax). The roof is the original paint, meaning this car has had only a partial respray.
The respray obviously didn't help though. In the rear door we have this gnarly dent behind the spare tire, showing that it's been hit again, that was fixed by cheapo parts store touch up paint with a brush, and not even in the same color.
Here's the easiest to spot sign of a respray, overspray lines where a panel shuts. In this case, it's the sides of the fenders underneath the hood. Notice the line where the new paint entered the gap. On a factory finish, the fenders are painted with the hood up, and will have a nice, uniform finish all the way down and past the hold-down bolts, which will be painted as well.
Moving on, we find flaking paint around the door handles. The handles have a very thin black rubber/felt gasket in between them and the door. This gasket should be bare, not painted. The repair shop once again failed to do any disassembly and painted those gaskets. Now that paint is flaking off. It gets worse!
On the same door, we find some serious chipping on the top of the plastic cladding, showing the bare black plastic underneath. The repair shop should have primed this panel with an adhesion promoting primer before laying the silver on, this is another sign of shoddy, substandard work.
Here's where it starts getting really interesting. See how the paint has a texture to it on the cladding?
A look inside the driver's door shows us silver paint on smooth plastic.
A look in the passenger door reveals bare black textured plastic! The repair shop used the lower-end models textured plastic:
On this L Special Edition version and just painted it! Not only did they totally cut corners and botch the paintwork, they didn't even use the correct parts. Yes, that means this car has smooth body panels on one side, and textured ones on the other. It gets worse.
This is the cladding and panel join on the rear passenger quarter panel. Notice how ill-fitting it is and the bubble in the metal above the plastic. A tap on this tells us this is either a rust bubble forming or a blob of body filler.
A further look into the wheel well reveals even more damage. This is either grinder marks or more botched filler where the outer and inner panels are joined. This quarter panel has likely been reworked in favor of a total replacement. That shows how hard one of the multiple hits on this car was.
The almighty Carfax on this car was completely clear, no accident history at all! A talk with the owner let the cat out of the bag. It's been hit hard, taking the front end out and the passenger doors and rear quarter. The owner did not have collision insurance, and so she paid cash out of pocket to have a local cheap repair shop do the repair work. This repair work was obviously done very sub-standard, and any dealership or mechanic will spot it immediately. Further, it is evident that the car suffered mechanical damage as a result of that shunt, which has never been addressed.
So the reality is, this car's owner thinks she has an "Excellent" condition (by KBB) car that she's trying to get top-dollar for. The reality is, it's a near-totaled car that's been improperly repaired with lingering mechanical issues that likely has a compromised crash structure, bad suspension components, and a chassis/unibody that is out of alignment and needs a frame rack. Unfortunately, an unwitting buyer will see the new headlights and paint and think it's a nice car with a clean history report and drive away completely ignorant to their horrible purchase and impending disaster.
I hope that won't happen, but it probably will. At least we can all learn something here. Inspect, inspect, inspect! Your eyes will tell you far more than any "vehicle history report" can. Needless to say, I passed on this purchase.
