The prospect of buying a salvage titled car for almost half the price of one of its clean titled counterparts is tempting for many potential car buyers, but increasingly it’s becoming a losing proposition. I have bought and reconditioned a few dozen salvage cars (I currently own three). As I am getting ready to embark on a new car buying adventure, I sat back to look at the math for my current daily driver.

I purchased my 2005 Cadillac STS from an insurance auction a few years ago for about $3,400. After it arrived, I spent another $2,300 to repair it and get it back on the road. I went through the receipts a few months ago and wrote up a summary of the costs. It worked out to be a great deal for me at the time but now that I am getting ready to replace it, I decided to take a look back and see if I actually saved any money in the long run.

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Rather than begin in media res, let’s recap:

I sold my first Porsche 911 (a “993” as they call it, which means it was built sometime from 1995 to 1998 and was the last version of the 911 to feature air-cooling; mine was a 1996) to a nice guy in Minnesota.

The very next day, my second Porsche 911 (a “997,” which means it was built between 2005 and 2012 and was intended to fix the ugly looks and perceived dubious build quality of its immediate forebear — the “996” 911, which was the all-new car that succeeded the above-mentioned 993; my 997 was a 2007 example of the hardcore GT3 variant) met its end after a teenaged driver failed to yield immediately in front of me, resulting in a collision.

With no means of transportation beyond the shared mobility lifestyle or MARTA, it was time to start shopping for another car. I didn’t really have a defined budget, so I considered cars across a fairly wide price range.

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Price is the deciding factor in many new car purchases, so it’s no surprise that dealerships do all they can to advertise the lowest number possible. While the internet has given consumers a lot of power when it comes to purchasing a new car, many consumers still fall for age-old pricing tricks.

One of the easiest ways to reel people into a dealership is to set up an advertisement for a decently optioned popular car at a sale price significantly lower than MSRP. This advertisement will usually be the lowest in the geographic area and would cause a loss for the dealership if sold. The way that deceptive dealers get around honoring the advertised price is by specifying a single stock number that qualifies and then asking a friend or relative to put a deposit on that specific vehicle as soon as the advertisement goes up online or in print.

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Every automotive enthusiast has an opinion when it comes to car buying and many are quick to point to an orphan car for a good deal. While some orphan cars are a bargain for their genre, maintaining some of them can be an exercise in futility. Internet commenters and forum aficionados are quick to defend their recommendations and point to some parts law that supposedly forces manufacturers to provide parts for 10 or 20 years after they kill a model, but no such law exists. While there are laws like the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act that provide some protection in certain situations, it’s nowhere near the 10-year mark.

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We just had a fight.

Scratch that. We were still having a fight. This was just the tense calm between volleys of verbal mortar fire. I won’t even tell you what we were fighting about. The subject was so stupid it would make my girlfriend and I both look like utter idiots — like those times when you shout at a character in a TV show to grow up and “just say you’re sorry already!”

Instead of doing what any rational human would do, I figured my only chance of peace was to escape the waves of relationship-drama ordnance. I grabbed the keys to this week’s Charger along with my vaporizer and fled the front line to regroup and regain my sanity.

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Car buyers are tired of the dog and pony show that goes along with trying to negotiate for a new car and are quickly turning to car buying services like TrueCar as a way to get transparency into the pricing process.

While places like TrueCar will save you a little money compared to just walking in to a dealer off the street, they won’t get you the absolute best price and will do it at the cost of your privacy. TrueCar makes money by charging dealers $299 to $399 per lead once a customer that was referred from them makes a purchase. They gather data from various automotive data aggregators along with vehicle registration and tax sources and perform analysis on it in order to establish an average price paid.

One of the requirements for affiliated dealers is to give them access to their Dealership Management System (DMS) or to manually transmit vehicle sales data to a supported third-party vendor. A DMS is a management system that dealers use to manage customers and vehicles that contains information such as pricing for vehicles bought and sold along with customer details like names, addresses, and social security numbers.

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I am completely at a loss to think of another sport that tests man and machine as much as motorsport. Maybe bobsledding? Nah, scratch that.

Automakers have a history of testing their latest and greatest at road courses, ovals and street circuits all over the world. Some of the best technological innovations have come directly from racing. But, is that still the case? Is racing still the test bed it used to be for what we see on our cars a decade from now? And does it still help automakers capture the hearts and minds of the car-buying public?

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The Detroit Bureau is reporting that even though June was a record sales month for many automakers, many of those sales were partly fueled with record incentives from the manufacturer.

Buyers could get up to $8,000 knocked of the price of a Kia K900 or up to $7,000 off of Ford hybrids or electric cars — even $8,000 for the 2015 Ford C-Max Energi.

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The august founder of TTAC, Robert Farago, asked me to shop around for a Lexus IS F nearly seven years ago.

Those were bad old days. The “Fall of 2008” was a brutal, hopeless, and downright dire time in the American retail car market. Nobody was buying $50,000+ sports cars like this Lexus, and the few that could afford to were too busy watching their stock values sink like stones and their home values dive straight into the ass end of a 20 year time warp.

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You have worked hard to save the $20,000 you need to purchase the car of your dreams. You’re ready to step into the dealership, walk straight to the manager in the back, plunk down those greenbacks, and say, “I have cash! Give me your best price!”

This may have worked in the days before electronic banking and factory rebates, but paying cash today will likely cost you more.

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That moment you realize the oldest car in the parking lot is yours.

Yeah, I just had that moment.

The car in question is a 2001 Honda Accord EX. Four-door. Five-speed. A dodo bird of a used car stuck in today’s finance driven market. I walked around the parking lot you see above trying to find one vehicle, any vehicle, that’s as old as mine.

The blue ’05-ish Caravan on the bottom left came a bit close, but it didn’t happen. Instead, everything else seemed to be on the younger side of the curve, the overwhelming majority of vehicles sold new at a later time in history.

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About a third of the questions I get from readers center around one issue: euthanasia in the car world, or what I like to call “automotive decrapitation”.

In other words, when is it the right time to recycle an old car and transform it into a cheap Chinese washer and dryer?

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Yesterday, I traded the most hysterically fun car I have ever owned, a 2008 Honda S2000, for a new 2015 Volkswagen GTI 6-speed manual.

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Steven

Love your articles on TTAC. Especially those on auctions, your dealership, and used cars.

I was wondering, do you provide services to buyers looking to buy a specific car? The prices in ATL are much better than the market in New England, to the point where I would be willing to fly down, buy a car and drive it back up. (I also have some friends in ATL anyway.)

If you do please let me know. I’ve been hunting for a decent priced NB Mazda Miata – and in my neck of the woods many are quite over priced.

If not no worries. I’ll continue to enjoy your articles.

Thanks!

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Life is sometimes about extremes, and with the extreme life of buying and selling cars comes two cars, recently purchased by me, which easily represent the polar opposites of all things automotive.

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