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Remind me...who is this Guru guy?...PLUS, how to tell if a car has been wrecked without a Carfax report
Remind me...who is this Guru guy?...PLUS, how to tell if a car has been wrecked without a Carfax report
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About this episode
Lenny Lawson, the car guru, shares his extensive experience in the automotive industry, emphasizing the importance of understanding vehicle history and condition before making a purchase. He recounts his recent acquisition of a 1957 Chevy Bel Air and discusses strategies for identifying if a car has been wrecked without relying solely on Carfax reports. Lenny provides practical tips on inspecting vehicles for signs of previous damage, including checking for tape lines and overspray. His insights aim to empower buyers to make informed decisions and avoid common pitfalls in car buying.
Topics:
vehicle history
car inspections
buying advice
wrecked cars
paint quality
classic cars
Carfax alternatives
negotiation techniques
Email Lennie at [email protected]
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Technical
Too Afraid to Ask
Car
Chevrolet Bel Air
"...sorry, but I've always wanted to own a 1957 Chevy Bel Air two-door hardtop. It's just something that I've a..."
Car
Ford F150
"Now sometimes they'll just pop right open with your finger but other times you have to reach in and push a button or something like that on my F-150, I have to push a button on the inside of the cab."
Car
Chevrolet 57 Chevrolet
"...y, I'm back. You know I have 157 pictures of this 57 Chevrolet that I bought, but I'm still a little nervous"
Select text to request an explanation
Hey, folks, Lenny Lawson here, the car guru, and sometimes it is incumbent upon me because
of the growth of the podcast and the fact that it goes all over the country and the world
for that matter, that I reintroduce myself a little bit, and since this is a local radio
program as well, I'm sorry, but you may know who I am or not.
I don't know.
I'm Taylor right now.
Currently, I am the owner of Gateway Ford and Gateway Nissan in Greenville, Tennessee,
and I have owned or been a part of, gosh, six different dealerships at one time.
My family's been in the car business since 1930.
I have been doing this for 47 years myself, never had it.
Well, I did have one other job.
I worked in a feed store unloading box cars when I was in college to help pay for my honeymoon,
but that's pretty much it as far as getting a payroll check other than the car dealerships.
So my experience is very useful, I think, for people who are interested in improving
their car life and paying less for vehicles when they buy them, getting more for their vehicles
when they sell them, understanding what's going on in the service department and how
to effectively deal with all kinds of situations that can happen in service, everything from
recalls to problem cars, buybacks, lemons, how to deal with a service department that's
uncooperative when you wreck your car, how do you pick a body shop?
Or if you're thinking about buying a car, how do you tell if it's been wrecked?
We're going to talk about that today in addition to a few other things, but yeah, that's
who I am.
I am a new car dealer with a twist, I do tell it like it is.
Why do I do that?
Well, I'm at a stage in life where I just felt like I need to take something that
I know a lot about and share it with people who really don't know that much about it and
will positively impact their lives.
You keep more money in your pocket and don't give it to a car dealer, especially a dishonest
one.
That's a good thing.
If you are able to walk into a dealership and not be intimidated, if you're a female
or a male or whatever and you go into a store and they start throwing all these
different negotiating techniques at you that you're unfamiliar with, I want you to be prepared
for that because that is a mission that I have assumed.
So enough about me.
Let's talk about you.
Oh, one more thing about me.
I did buy a car yesterday.
I had no intentions of buying a car yesterday.
The advantage of being a car dealer is that you can make spontaneous decisions about
buying cars, but I still do my research.
So I was on my favorite auction website, bringatrailer.com.
And I'm sorry, but I've always wanted to own a 1957 Chevy Bel Air two-door hardtop.
It's just something that I've always wanted.
When I was in high school, one of our best friends had the same car except a convertible.
And that would be nicer.
I'd rather have a convertible, but that's an extra probably $25,000, $30,000 I don't
want to spend.
The car showed up, and I started watching it, and it was too cheap.
And so I really started digging in, dug into the photos, really looked at, I mean, I had
157 photos.
That's what it takes to be able to sell a car online without somebody seeing it.
And so I put a bid in.
I think my first bid was, I think, $27,000.
I mean, it would cost $100,000 to $120,000, $125,000 to restore this car.
That's if it didn't have a lot of rust issues.
I mean, it's a big car.
There's a lot of metal there in the engine, rebuilding the engine, all that stuff.
But this car was, I wouldn't call it perfect, but it is a show car.
And it was just too cheap, so I jumped in.
And I was bidding back and forth with these guys, and I'd hit it $1,000, then hit it $250,000
just to kind of slow things down, and then it would take off.
Got down to where it was like, I don't know, 20 seconds left, and I hit my last bid.
I said, okay, I'm done.
And so with Bring a Trailer, it resets the clock to two minutes.
Every time somebody bids, it could be down to one second.
If somebody bids, it resets to two minutes.
So it reset.
And I sat there, and I watched it.
And it got down to 30 seconds.
I said, hmm, this is interesting, 20, 1980.
I said, I'm going to own this car.
And it got down to zero.
And I own the car now.
It's in Bloomington, Illinois.
And there are Bloomington, Minnesota, and a Bloomington, Indiana.
I think that's where Indiana University is, isn't it?
But yeah, this was Bloomington, Illinois.
And it was owned by a large dealership group.
And after talking to them, found out that they got into a real buying spree during the COVID
pandemic and bought a whole bunch of vintage cars, folks that was the wrong time to be
buying them because they were high, extremely high.
And that's when they bought them and they decided to start selling them at the wrong
time.
They said, buy low, sell high.
With their buy, they bought high, selling low.
And so I paid $41,500 for a car that I truly believe is worth $60,000 to $70,000.
So in Lenny Lawson's book, that's a pretty good buy.
I told Abby, one of my daughters, I bought another car.
You didn't.
I did.
Sorry, what is it this time?
Another Ford?
I said, no, believe it or not.
It's Chevrolet.
It's like sacrilege.
No, it's not.
No, most of my history is Chevrolet from, let's see, 1930 to 2010.
So anyway, I have no guilt because I know what I can do with it.
I'm going to play with it for a while, though.
No doubt about it because it is gorgeous.
It'll be in the next cars and coffee event that I have here at Gateway Ford.
So it's one of the things I really enjoy doing is buying and selling old cars.
But for you new listeners, that's not what this is about.
Well, occasionally it is I do talk about these kind of things.
But the main thing that I do is what's in the My Car Guru guidebook, which you can get.
All you have to do is send me your email address and I'll forward it to you.
It's protection.
As a matter of fact, I just got an email, no, as a text message.
It shows up on my computer screen from a person requesting the My Car Guru guidebook.
I didn't plan that.
It just happened.
Okay, I'll be back in just one minute.
Okay, I am back.
We are talking about car buying mistakes this week.
And one of the biggest ones that people make and I steered somebody clear of one of
those last week.
As a matter of fact, they were wanting to buy a vehicle.
They sent me the 17-digit VIN number.
They even sent me the buyer's order or the sales contract.
I call them buyer's order because ours say buyer's order on the top of it.
But it's a retail sales contract between him and the dealership that he was dealing
with.
It had the selling price of the vehicle and the breakdown of all the taxes and what
they were paying him for his trade in.
He wanted me to check out the truck that he was thinking about buying.
In Tennessee, we're kind of in the middle of, I guess, the mid-south and probably 95% of
all new trucks sold in this area, this region of the country, are four-wheel drive.
So if you buy a two-wheel drive, you are a weirdo.
No, I'm just kidding.
You just have figured out that, well, since it doesn't snow much anymore, you can
live without four-wheel drive and you don't go off-road and it probably makes more
sense than even I understand.
But you get down in Georgia, from Atlanta, down, two-wheel drives are 50% of sales and
in Florida, probably 65% of sales are two-wheel drive because you just don't need a four-wheel
drive truck down there.
It doesn't snow that much.
So he was wanting to buy a two-wheel drive.
What was it?
Ford Ranger, I pulled the history, came from Michigan.
Strike one, it also had damage history.
It had been wrecked.
Strike two, you know, in my book, you don't even need a strike three.
You're already out.
I'm not buying it.
Well, I guess strike three was the fact that it was two-wheel drive.
I'm not buying a two-wheel drive truck from Michigan where they salt the roads like crazy
and that has been wrecked and no thank you.
Well it drives good, Lenny.
Well, I don't care how it drives.
I mean if you plan on keeping it for the rest of your life, fine.
But if you're going to ever try to trade it, that wreck's going to show up, that Michigan
is going to show up, you're not paying a wrecked Michigan price.
You're paying a full price just as if the vehicle was born in Tennessee and never
left.
There's a difference.
Where a vehicle comes from makes a difference.
Those of you who live up north, you don't have a choice really unless you have a dealer
that is local that goes to Statesville, North Carolina or Atlanta or any of the other southern
most auto auctions and buys their cars.
They have more sense usually than to go up in New York to an auction or Minnesota to
buy vehicles because people that live there know and understand.
I guess most of them do.
Hopefully they do.
I think in the old days they used to put rust preventative.
They would, we would drill, well we did it at our dealership too because it was something
that we could sell and make a profit on.
We would drill holes in perfectly good metal in the doors, in the A, B and C and D
pillars of the vehicle, a quarter panel, any place that we felt like there was an empty space
where water could possibly get into and then add salt to it and then you've got a mixture
for rust.
We would protect it with, I think it was called Z-Barked and then we would undercoat
vehicles also, brand new vehicles.
They figured out that when they started dipping all these bodies and new cars in zinc
and doing all this other rust preventative plus the factory said, if you do that you
are voiding the warranty on all the metal panels.
That was enough for us to say, okay we won't do it anymore, sorry.
But they continued to do that up north and if you, I think it's a good thing, I mean
it'll help prevent it, especially on pickup trucks they have weep holes, that's where
if water gets in there it can come out but unfortunately water gets in there that
is mixed with salt, especially in the winter, gets slung up there by the tires and it just
stays there until the right conditions and it rusts, it rusts completely through.
I've seen it so many times you'll see a vehicle driving down the interstate from Michigan
and you know it's just completely eaten up with rust along the rocker panels and
above the fenders and that's just, that's just what happens.
Thus the reason we don't like buying vehicles from up north.
So I told this gentleman don't buy that truck, come on, come back home.
It was in Knoxville, some dealer outside of Knoxville.
What the heck is a dealer from Knoxville buying vehicles from Michigan?
You know why they do it?
Because they're cheaper.
They pay less for cars from Michigan than in due for cars that were originally titled
in like Florida or Texas or Alabama or Tennessee for that matter.
So that's one of the first things that I'm going to do if I'm evaluating a vehicle pull
the history.
Look at Carfax or AutoCheck.
AutoCheck is a division or a product of Experian.
Experian is one of the credit bureaus.
You can sign up with Experian and check your own credit out if you want to.
I think everybody gets one or two free pulls of their credit per year if you go
through TransUnion or Experian or whatever the other one is.
Can't remember right now.
We use AutoCheck and it's proven to be very accurate.
Carfax probably is too.
Carfax is better known.
Just pull one of them and don't just look for, you know, to make sure the odometer is correct.
Make sure that the car hasn't been wrecked.
See where it comes from.
Look at the first place it was titled and that will tell you a lot and how long
it lived there because if it's been there two or three years, don't buy it.
Sorry people up north.
It's not, you know, I'm not trying to be mean or anything.
It's just the way it is.
But here's the problem with these reports is that if somebody doesn't like turn it
into their insurance company, then it may not show up on a report that it's been
wrecked.
So how do you tell if a car's been damaged?
Well, let's go through a few little steps that we do.
We open the doors on the car and we fill around the edges of the door and around the
edges of the door jam where the door closes in and we're feeling around there for tape
lines because when you paint a car or put clear coat on top of other paint, you have to tape
it off or you get overspray over everything.
So when you pull that tape off after the paint dries, it leaves a little line there.
You can feel it.
It goes all along the edge of the door or all the way up the door jam.
And so we're looking for that.
We're also getting down on our hands and knees.
Yes, we do that not to pray for people to buy cars but to look at the underside of
their cars for overspray because when it's in a body shop, when they're painting the
lower side of the door or painting the rocker panels, then many times a lot of spray
will go underneath the car and land on the frame and it stays there so you'll see that.
Another thing I always do is open the gas door where you put your gas in.
Now sometimes they'll just pop right open with your finger but other times you have
to reach in and push a button or something like that on my F-150, I have to push a button
on the inside of the cab.
The little door flips open.
I'm looking around there because that is a place that most body shops ignore when they're
doing paint work.
They just kind of let the overspray just kind of go in there and it just gets all over
the place.
And you can tell because if it's factory original paint, it's just clean and just
smooth and exactly like it is on the outside on the inside of that filler door there.
If it's really rough and looks like it's been sprayed with a spray can, well it's been painted.
There could be a bedside of a truck that's been painted.
You pull it up on a car fax, it doesn't show anything.
And it's probably because the guy ran into or a deer ran into his truck and he never
reported it because either he mistakenly thought that his insurance premiums would
go up or he didn't want to tell his wife or some other reason.
Or he didn't want it to show up on a car fax maybe.
I mean there's a lot of reasons that people don't report.
I had a guy yesterday call me.
He bought a Ford F-150 Raptor and he said it was a particular color.
And he said, Lenny, from what I understand that Raptors that are painted this color
will have a lot of areas that just don't get any paint at all.
They actually leave it the color of the primer.
I said this is the first I've heard of this because he had taken it to a dealership,
not mine but some other dealership in another town close to me and they agreed
to repaint that vehicle while under warranty.
And I said well, you know you gotta think about that because right now
if somebody pulls a car fax it shows that it's never had any body work.
But as soon as you have that thing painted and that repair order is filed with the
manufacturer, bingo!
It's gonna show up on a car fax or an auto check or and an auto check
that this vehicle has been painted.
That's gonna natively impact the value of your vehicle.
And he said, but I really want it painted.
I don't want to look at that.
He said the whole back of his cab between the cab and the bed was white.
The rest of the truck is green.
Inside of his gas story is white.
You can see inside of his fenders, it's white.
Rest of the vehicle is green.
Apparently that's the way Ford did it.
Now that sounds crazy to me.
I've never seen it, never heard it, but he says that's a fact.
He found it on the forums and so forth.
Plus the Ford dealer agreed to do it, agreed to paint it.
So I recommended that he do this.
Take pictures of it.
Take pictures of everything that you're getting painted.
When they get done painting it, take pictures of that
and include a copy of the repair order.
Just fold it all up, put it in an envelope
and stick it in your glove box.
And whenever you get ready to trade that truck,
before they pull a car fax or an auto check,
say oh by the way, I had some work done to this vehicle
because of the way it was shipped from the factory
and you have all this evidence
and you pull it to them, they'll go oh, okay.
Well that's good.
This auto check, if we pull in,
it shows that it's had paint work,
it's not because of wreck, it's because of that.
Yeah, that's exactly it, okay, nevermind then.
And that won't be a big deal.
But primarily when you're trying to evaluate a vehicle,
you're looking for sloppy work, basically.
You're looking for overspray.
You're looking for tape lines.
You're looking for, raise the hood too
because there'll be tape lines along the edge of the hood
where it meets the fender, maybe on the hood itself.
And also just stand back from the vehicle in low light,
not low light, but not in glaring sun
because it'll be hard to see.
Just look down the sidelines of the vehicle.
Does the paint look uniform?
Or does it vary in texture as you look down it?
Because paint is not flat, it looks flat.
But when you look really close,
there's something called an orange peel.
It looks like an orange peel.
It's bumpy.
And unless you've had somebody grinding on it
with a buffer, it's not gonna be flat.
And so you wanna look for that,
but you also wanna make sure that it's uniform.
That it's not real flat in one section,
real bumpy in another section.
Cause that probably means that there's been some paint work.
And just wavy lines also means
that there's probably been some body work.
So these are just things that you need to look for
and not always trust a car fact.
So, okay, I'll be back in one minute.
Okay, I'm back.
You know I have 157 pictures of this 57 Chevrolet
that I bought, but I'm still a little nervous
because I was looking for tape lines.
Now, yeah, it's been painted stuff.
I just wanna make sure that they had all of the
bright work, all the chrome work,
the weather strips, the door handles, the mirrors,
all of that was off before they painted it.
And then they put that on because if you don't,
you get these tape lines, you get these jagged edges
and I'm gonna be sick if that's the case.
But they assured me that it's not
and all I can do is trust them.
So I called my guy, he goes and picks up cars for me
and I'm giving him a F-250 to drive in my aluminum trailer
and he's headed out to Bloomington, Illinois
tomorrow to pick up Lenny Lawson's.
57 Chevy, something I've wanted for a long time.
Just the coolest, I love tail fins.
And just the front end,
it looks like it's got little rocket launchers on it.
It's very kind of airplane oriented.
We've got a big airplane show,
airplane slash car show coming up.
I think it's in October.
And I'm gonna have that car there.
I'm so excited.
So again, if you need me,
423-552-2020 or Lenny Lawson,
2020 at gmail.com.
And if you want the guidebook,
just text me your email address
and I'll turn it around quickly.
I can do it on my phone.
And why would you want the guidebook?
You'll see when you get it.
Well, thanks for listening
and I'll see you next time.
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