Quote:
Originally Posted by analogue
So I had a crazy idea after doing the options spreadsheet. What if I could pull the VIN histories of the 740 cars in the US and provide a sheet with stats like # of clean titles, average mileage, # of owners, open recalls, etc.
This is all seems doable except the cost is a bit more than I'm willing to foot. The cheapest way I have found is through Autocheck. They let you order 300 VIN histories for $100, meaning I need $300 to do this.
You know how this stuff goes, so I really need you to be honest about paying up if you vote that way. What I can offer is that people who contribute would get the full VIN report for their car. That alone would cost $25, so contributing at the $20 level would save you $5 if you wanted a report anyway.
And of course if someone has a dealer contact who could run these without additional costs, I'm all ears. I've talked to more than one of my contacts and it seems everyone still pays by volume, or won't admit they have unlimited access.
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If you could make up a questionnaire that was formatted so that you could cut and paste the answers into your spreadsheet, I bet you could get a lot of information from forum members. In addition, even if you go the route of buying Autocheck or Carfax reports, data such as the # of owners is often, maybe more often than not, incorrect. You would have to read through the reports and edit it for each car. This is because they frequently count a dealer who bought the used car as one of the owners, and a car that has 5 or 6 reported owners might really only have had 2 or 3. They also, sometimes, under-count the number, especially if the car doesn't change states when it is resold. Reported mileage can be way off, usually because certain dealers and service locations do not report to these reporting companies. If you looked at the Carfaxs for my BMWs, you would think they haven't been serviced since I bought them, when in fact they are regularly serviced however my BMW dealer just doesn't report to Carfax, except possibly when they can't avoid it such as when a car is resold (but it may be the DMV that is reporting this information in that case). The DMV sometimes does not put the mileage on the title and records when a car is resold, especially and almost always with cars older than 10 years, or it may go on the title but not get reported to these agencies. Frequently, erroneous mileage numbers get reported that can make it look way high or way low, or even that the odometer was rolled back, when in fact someone just made a typo. Then the owner, if he is aware of it, has to go through a difficult process to get Carfax or Autocheck to correct the error. Of course, if the owner is unaware of this then he or she won't try to get it corrected.
The result can be huge gaps in the data and you could buy a report on a car and literally have no entries for the last several years. I just looked at the last Carfax I had generated on my 1M, which was in June of 2017. The last entry is dated 7/13/2015, almost exactly 2 years prior to the date of the report. In the interim, the car has been serviced several times, and the registration renewed, but there is no record of any of this.
Garbage in, garbage out, as in the old saying.