[TR] Carfax busted

[Karl Vacek]

We bought a used car last year and though it seemed fine (and really is) I 
decided to spend the $$ on CarFax anyway.  Since it was a couple of bucks 
more to get unlimited reports for a month, I took that option.

According to CarFax, our old Suburban has never had an accident, even though 
it rammed other cars a couple of times thanks to the antilock brakes, and 
then it got t-boned while driving down the street.  All were reported, all 
required insurance claims, and not one showed up in the report.  And though 
it'd been to a GM dealer within the past couple of years, it was reported as 
having about 80,000 miles, which is what it had when we bought it in 1997 - 
it has 245,000 now.

Maybe the Suburban is in the 0.2% with hidden history too.

Karl



>> http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2009/vehicle_history_reports/main.html
>>
>> interesting report
>
> Nothing too surprising, though.  CarFax claims to be "most complete", 
> which
> means only they have more data points than their competition does.  It 
> does
> NOT say they have all the relevant information about any particular car.
>
> And the news report conveniently leaves out facts like how many thousands 
> of
> cars they had to search, to find 10 of them that had problems not logged 
> in
> CarFax.  Of course, "0.2% of cars have a hidden history" doesn't make as
> good a headline!
>
> Randall