Pre-Purchase Inspections

Buy the underside, not the paint

A car that has spent its life in Milwaukee can look immaculate above the door sills and be structurally finished below them. Shiny paint and a clean interior tell you how a previous owner treated the cabin. They tell you nothing at all about what six winters of brine did to the subframe mounts, the brake lines or the rocker seams.

So that is where a serious inspection here starts. Every one includes the undercarriage check, graded and photographed, and it is the single item most likely to change your mind about a car - or to knock a real number off the asking price.

What a scan tells you that a seller will not

Codes can be cleared before you arrive. Stored history, freeze frame data, readiness monitors and module-level fault records are much harder to erase cleanly, and they leave a trail. A car whose monitors are all conveniently incomplete was scanned recently, and that is worth knowing.

We also read the service history out of the car where the vehicle stores it, check the mileage against what the modules report, and look for the specific pattern of an airbag module or cluster that does not match everything around it.

The report, and what you do with it

You get a written report the same day with photographs, findings graded urgent, soon or fine, and a plain verdict. Not a score out of ten - a paragraph saying what we would do in your position.

Plenty of our reports end with buy it. Some end with buy it and use these three things to negotiate. A few end with walk away, and those are the ones people thank us for. We have no relationship with the seller and nothing to gain either way, which is the entire point of paying an independent.