How Not To Buy A Car

I must have been desperate.
On the road to acquiring my future race car, along with a bunch of other rules, I've managed to break my biggest rule of all: Never buy a car at night...

On Saturday afternoon, Shirley and I took a nice little drive to Sacramento to look at a potential little gem in the rough: a 1990 325i with a relatively clean title (more on that later), 160K miles on the clock, and a reasonable $2K asking price. Leaving Fremont at about 3:30, and staring at stop-and-go traffic at the 238, I was doubtful that we would beat the sun. 2 minutes of deliberation and I made the commitment: "The car will be gone tomorrow", I told myself... "You'll kick yourself if you don't go". "At least you'll have spent some nice quality time with your woman in a quiet drive through the country"... "We could pick up Mexican food along the way"... And on and on...

I motored that little 2.2L in Shirley's old Accord as fast as I could. But there was no way I could beat that sun. And to top it off, right around Vacaville, I look over the median and the 80 westbound was absolutely deserted...a quick call to 511 revealed that the freeway had been shut down. And sure enough, we began to track a long line of cars stopped in bumper-to-bumper traffic all the way out to Dixon(!!). Great, that means we won't be able to get home. Well, too late now.

I pushed the accelerator even harder.

2 and a half hours later, we arrived in Sacramento and came across the car dimly lit by the green apartment lights and the Accord's headlights. Not bad, I thought. Armed with my trusty MagLite, I proceed to do the usual checks for rust, wheel bearings, sludgy coolant, strange smelling oil, bad clutch, body panel VIN tag matching (all except for hood and fender), and oil leaks (a bad one at the valve cover gasket). The paint is pretty much jacked, but no concern -- I just need it to survive a year, then I'll consider a respray. No record of timing belt change neither.

Now the interior...seats: jacked (but I don't care); water damage - none that I could smell or see (in this light); dash cracked (again, don't care); sunroof slow/barely operable (also don't care); locks, windows, mirrors, radio are all working (surprisingly!); steering wheel jacked (don't care). No holes in carpet either. Hmm...not bad, just a bunch of little stuff and I could drive this thing to work.

OK, now the road test... Fire it up, whoa. Bad muffler. Owner tells me exhaust was replaced with a ratty one. Fine, no problem. I look underneath and sure enough, brand new stainless steel B-pipe connected to junky old (I assume original) muffler. But wait...what's this? Even in that dim light, anyone can see that the tiny tube under there shuuuure ain't no catalytic converter. I ask the owner for a smog check receipt, and sure enough, it passed. How da heck did they get this thing to pass smog? Whatever. I'll decide later if I wanna be green and save some trees for the next year until it becomes a dedicated track machine.

Idles great, ease into first, roll down the driveway. Pull out onto the street, accelerate. Wow, lots of power with no cat. No missing, and no strange pulling side to side. Brakes and transmission are solid, no bad whining from rear end. Whoa...what the @#*&$^*@# is that noise! Get it up above 40 and the moaning is even louder. It gets loud enough that we could barely hear each other talk. Owner claims it's related to the exhaust, but dipping in the clutch and rolling in idle shows it's definitely not engine speed sensitive. Rear wheel bearings are a common fail point in these cars, so my entirely amateur and unprofessional diagnosis is a $50 bearing and $200 or so replacement job. And hooooieee are these shocks blown. This thing feels like a boat. Perfect, I was going to junk the suspension anyways. But I might have to do it sooner than I hoped.

Lastly, the paperwork. And here's where it gets kinda weird. The car was donated to charity in May of last year from the second owner (who owned it since about 60K miles). Between May and now, not sure how it got into the current owner's hands. But basically, there is no real proof that this owner actually owned the car. The charity had filled out the paperwork to sell the car to someone in November, but left the buyer fields blank. Hmmmm. The CarFax ran clean (car isn't stolen, no salvage title, mileage all looks good) and she seems like a decent enough person living out of a well-settled-in apartment. She talks a lot...but doesn't come across as a crook. To top it off, there's no service records. At minimum I'm staring at a timing belt & water pump job. At worst, I'm looking at a new motor. I can't believe how much I'm rolling the dice on this thing. But then again, I'm not thinking straight...

So I do the math in my head and offer her $1700. Big mistake...she immediately accepts. I kick myself for not following the rule of starting out well below your best price and work your way up from there. It's late, it's freakin' freezing in Sac, and I'm tired.

Shirley laughs at me, but God bless her, is entirely supportive through this whole ordeal.

Traffic on 80 westbound hasn't cleared, so we U-turn at Dixon and head south on 113 (to 12 West). 2 hours with bad bearings gives you a really nasty headache, especially when you're sweating bullets over the prospect of an unknown timing belt that's libel to snap at any moment (or 40 thousand miles from now). We stop somewhere in Vallejo to take a break (Auto Mall Parkway?) and get surprisingly very very good Thai food at Cha-Am (their soup special was amazing!). Head back on the road and finally get home around 10:30 at night.

And with a fairly long winded introduction, my road to wheel-to-wheel madness begins.

Up next, dealing with the paperwork police and taking full inventory of what I'm getting myself into.