Crazy Carfax question

Nope, definitely NOT assuming that. I will do this because I'm picky. And I see this regularly when other people sell their cars but by no means do I assume people are going to do this. I know that most, the vast majority even, will not. That's on them, not Carfax's fault.

I'm sure this does happen but I don't think it's an epidemic. Most people are not willing to pay cash for a repair to just keep the repair off Carfax compared to filing a claim and having insurance cover the cost. In most instances any perceived value decrease because a car was repaired is going to be much less than the difference the owner would have to pay compared to insurance. Would you rather pay your $1000 deductible and have your vehicle value decrease by ~$2-3k or would you rather pay $10k out of pocket to fix your vehicle?

Again, this isn't Carfax's fault. Carfax doesn't decide how much your car is worth. It isn't a vehicle appraisal. It just aggregates and reports information about vehicle history.

But it kinda doesn't matter. Not all vehicle repairs end up on Carfax anyway so anyone with a little common sense realizes that a car can still have been in an accident or had repairs done which are not on Carfax for one reason or another. In the end, it's still the buyer's responsibility to inspect the vehicle and do their own due diligence.

 

They’ll become the boy that cried wolf, and devalue their brand. For now, they’re riding their finial wave right and don’t give AF about anything else.

 

With the car i just sold to buy my tacoma, it had an "accident" which was a bit of hail i had repaired with pdr. I kept a receipt and had pictures, showed the buyer and they didnt mind. Showing people what happened with minor stuff helps a lot.

 

SMART!
Though I feel like only a private buyer will listen. If trading in, the dealer will most likely not, as they don't want to keep such information,,, it's just turn n burn for them.

 

I'm sure you're correct. Dealers are going to be incentivized to give you as little as humanly possible. I suspect the type of people who trade in vehicles are not the same people who would document an accident. Trading in a vehicle means you're willing to accept a significant amount less than your vehicle's market value. That type of person doesn't seem like the type to care about what's on their carfax since they already don't care about getting the most they can when they sell the vehicle.

The combo of trading in vehicles and buying new from a dealer is pretty much the worst case scenario when buying vehicles. Sell your vehicle on the private market and buy a lightly used, near new vehicle and you'll save thousands of dollars, possibly tens of thousands if we're talking about higher end stuff.

 

100% agree, i just never trade vehicles in. Dealer wanted to give me 6k for my last car, i sold it for 10k in less than 24 hours myself. My wife's last car, dealer offered 14k and i sold it for 19k. Im probably in the minority, but i never trade cars in because the stealership is going to screw you.

 

Picture of damage. Tail light lens broken. And very small rub just below and to the left of the TRD sticker, right above the lens crack. Rub buffed out and can't tell it was even there.

Seems crazy to me this would show up on a carfax. How about the vehicles damaged in transit. Does that show up?
I did keep pictures in case something like this happened.

 

Carvana has paid me significantly more than the dealer on last 3 trades, yes I know you lose some tax credit but rather deal with Carvana than the some of the current wack jobs who sometimes respond to used car sales

 

Carfax doesn't discriminate. They are simply a big, automatic, aggregator of data. If an accident, service record, title update...etc is reported to a database that Carfax pulls from then it will be on their report. They don't have someone sitting at a desk reviewing insurance records, looking at adjuster photos...etc and making some subjective determination on what should or should not be included on a report. If it's in the database then it shows up on their report. End of story.

That said, they have started providing some basic info like what part of the vehicle was damaged and an estimate on severity. I'm not exactly sure how they're doing that but I imagine they're just scraping the insurance reports for additional data or key words. I personally don't put a whole lot of faith in those being accurate. It's a helpful piece of info but I always assume damage could be considerably more or less severe than what you see reported on Carfax. Again, this is why you use Carfax as a basic piece of data which you should verify with other sources rather than trust blindly.

 

I get both sides…all I will say is that I agree with those who don’t think Carfax should be the end all, be all of accident reporting. I appreciate it as a buyer, but I still don’t trust it fully. For example, when I purchased my ‘23, part of my warranty was that certain accidents can/will be taken care of in a way that won’t “show up on Carfax”. I’m still not quite sure how it all works tbh.


Either way, it seems odd to me that you can have your truck get significant damage and it not show up on carfax due to a Toyota warranty, but have a taillight cracked and it show up as an accident.

 

Well, the OP was in an accident. That accident was reported to insurance. So that's gonna be on the Carfax. There is NO question about why or how that happened. This is 100% normal and expected.

Work that dealers do can show up on Carfax - maintenance for example. I'm not familiar with exactly the situation you're referencing regarding warranty work for a damaged truck and I suspect the devil is in the detail here. But clearly, whatever the incident and resulting repairs were, they were not reported to a database Carfax has access to. Carfax does not have access to every single record that exists for every single vehicle. They have access to what they have access to. And on top of that, the info needs to actually be entered and entered correctly otherwise whatever Carfax reports will be missing or incorrect.

 

Yes, and my understanding is that if I was in an accident, and it was (obviously) reported to insurance then it still wouldn’t show up on Carfax with whatever warranty thing I have. Maybe I wasn’t clear when I said that part of the warranty makes sure that certain accidents don’t show up on Carfax and that I am not entirely sure how it works….but the fact that there are work arounds to ensure that some (major) repairs done by Toyota can go undetected, of sorts, by carfax is my point. Carfax is a great resource, but shouldn’t be taken at face value, especially when buying from a private seller.

 

this is specifically why "1 accident" cars on carfax mean absolutely nothing.

what matters isn't that something happened, but how it was repaired.

 

My 2nd gen was in the body shop twice and yet the carfax was completely clean when I traded it in and the dealship had it listed for sale.

 

for me, i'd prefer if the service showed every incident instead of picking and choosing. imo, it's far worse that some incidents aren't reported than minor incidents being reported at all.

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/tru...s-clean-carfax/story?id=18731208#.UbOr4_nrxyU

 

That's interesting, I've never heard of such a thing. But, it doesn't surprise me at all that Toyota would handle something like this differently. Cars are often refurbished (typically very minor) from small damage during transit or quality issues during manufacturing. Makes total sense that sort of work would be handled internally and wouldn't be able to be accessed by Carfax. Same thing when dealers refurb used cars they get on trade in. These vehicles regularly get PDR, wheel repairs, minor paint/body work and often replacement of OE parts that were either worn or had been replaced with aftermarket parts by the previous owner. None of that work would ever be entered into any sort of database which Carfax has access to. If you're buying a used car at a dealer you should assume that it has had some sort of refurbishment done.

Body shops rarely report work to any sort of database, typically what you're seeing on Carfax is from the insurance side, not the repair side.

Carfax isn't picking and choosing. They're reporting what is in the databases they have access to. This is why none of this has to do with Carfax at all, they just scrape databases for data. Its easier to put Carfax as the bad guy here but the issue people are complaining about has to do with the people creating the database records (insurance companies, state registration records, smog shops...etc) not with the company (Carfax) providing you access to what's in the databases. What you're asking for is essentially government regulation mandating what these entities report and what they don't. I'm not anti-regulation by any means but the regulation we're talking about here seems like it would be very far reaching and difficult to pin down. Sounds like a recipe for disaster.

I think the point is to understand Carfax's strengths and weaknesses rather than trying to "fix" something that's wrong. In an imperfect world, Carfax helps give us info. End of story. Is it all the info? No. Is it always accurate? No. Is it extremely helpful to many of us and MUCH, MUCH better than having no resource at all? YES!

 

However, Carvana wants to steal my 2017 TRD Sport w/28k for $19k. They keep sending me offers and I laugh. FU Carvana