USED CAR BUYING- Are you checking everything that you should?
After our previous article on online used car buying, I thought it’d be useful to deep dive into common problems that pre-owned cars have. To do this, we analyzed a set of >15,000 used cars and tried to see which are the problems that occur most frequently.
For the purpose of this analysis, we categorized them into 3 segments- Hatchbacks, Sedans, and SUVs.
Hatchbacks constituted 53% of the set, with sedans and SUVs were at 30% & 17% respectively.
The problems that we cover are largely related to a car’s engine, emissions, electricals etc. We capture these data points via our OBD dongle and help car buyers detect problems that aren’t visible to the naked eye. To find out more about the kind of data we capture, please write to me at arpan.banerjee@carpm.in
We checked which amongst these segments had the highest % of cars with issues. What we found was that the % of faulty hatchbacks and sedans were almost equal, but a higher % of SUVs that are up for sale tended to have problems.
As a next step, we analyzed just how many problems does a problematic car in fact have? Again, we found that sedans had a low number of problems per car, followed by hatchbacks, with SUVs having the highest number of problems on average (See table below)
If you are a used car buyer (individual OR dealer), it might be a good idea to have your SUVs’ engines and electricals checked a tad more thoroughly. These problems aren’t cheap to fix, and can add a considerable amount to the price that you already paid for the car.
Given that 14% of cars in this particular dataset had problems, it’s hardly an infrequent case. So, next time you are in the market to buy a pre-owned vehicle, don’t forget to use an OBD dongle to make sure there are no post purchase surprises.
These results do tie in nicely with the overall used car price depreciation trends. Hatchbacks tend to see lower depreciation rates, with SUVs traditionally depreciating the most. SUVs also have a higher cost of ownership (adjusted for price), and this analysis acts as further proof.
I assume most readers would want to go one level deeper and understand the exact kind of problems faced across segments. I will cover that in my next post, and will try to examine the effects of these problems on the total cost of ownership as well.
Would love to hear everyone’s thoughts and feedback. Please feel free to comment and share with your colleagues and friends. If you would like to know more about the kind of work we do at CaRPM, please don’t hesitate to email us at fix@carpm.in.
