One of the things that I was looking forward to is buying a car in America. Everyone told me how cheap cars are in the States, and how big the variety is - just select your preferred car and take it home at a surprisingly low price.

ahm…not really.

Apparently, the recent year have changed the Americans’ driving preferences quite a bit. Goodbye huge cars, Jeeps or SUVs - hello small, Japanese, gas-saving cars.

What this means in practice is that those lucky people who have bought:
1. Toyota Corolla
or
2. Honda Civic
Are sitting on gold mines. They can sell their cars within seconds while people who hold any other type of car are stuck with it for weeks.

How it works

• You start by defining your budget, target models, years and source (dealers are not very popular here, so you will most likely go to private owners). The best source of helping you making these decisions is Kelly Blue Book (http://www.kbb.com). This is an online price-list for cars that will calculate a market value for any car by model, year, milage, condition etc. It also contains user reviews for each of the car models.

• Once you define your target specturm of cars, you start searching for it. The search usually starts (and ends) at craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org). Everyone is selling and buying there now all over America. It’s quite amazing, but this site have become the de-facto standard of classifieds over the internet.

• If you find a car that seems relevant, first thing you do is that you ask for the VIN#. Each car here has a unique identification number by which you can track its complete history through websites like CarFax (http://www.carfax.com). You put in the car’s VIN and you get a full and detailed report of every accident the car has ever been through, number of previous owners, milage each owner did etc.

• An interesting term you should know is “salvaged title”. It basically means that this car was through a major accident, or that it was stolen and returned at some point. In reality, this actually translates into - “this is the car of the devil, do not touch it and if you do no one will buy it from you”.

• Once you do find a car and run it through the neccessary tests, the actual sale is done by the onwer simply handing you over an ownership title, which declares that you are now the owner of the car. You must then register it within 5 days in the DMV (Department of Motored Vehicles).

(Our car, in the middle of our street)

Our car
Our little community of friends have encountered some horror stories regarding cars - people who give you a VIN and then try to sell you a different car, people who “forget” to mention that the car is salvaged or people who sell their car for their brother who lived in Hong Kong, did not sign the title as required and doesn’t have a US Visa so he can’t sign it now as well.

We were extremely lucky to find a nice 2005 Hyundai Elantra with only 40,000 miles and another year of valid warranty. To find such a car it took over a month and a half of daily scanning of craigslist on all the areas that were near enough to reach without a car (the classic “I need a car to buy one” paradox). Keep your fingers crossed for us that it doesn’t get stolen!

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