You looked at a 2017 mid-spec sedan on the weekend. Private sale, driveway viewing, around 110,000 km on the clock. The owner can’t find the second key. The dash is clean, the body looks straight, and the short test drive felt fine. The price is fair, you’ve got the money ready, and the seller wants a decision by Friday.
What would a pre-purchase inspection catch on that car that you wouldn’t?
Pre-purchase inspections at Chandos Auto in Cheltenham turn up the same patterns on most used cars. The faults are rarely the dramatic, headline-grabbing ones. They are the everyday faults that drop a car’s real value by a thousand dollars or more, and the less obvious ones that show up six months after you sign the papers. Here is the workshop view of what gets found, and why it matters before you pay.
A pre-purchase inspection is a structured workshop check on a used car you are thinking about buying, done by a mechanic who has no stake in the sale. The inspector drives the car cold, lifts it on a hoist, scans the computer, checks the service history, and writes up everything the buyer cannot see from the driveway.
The procedural side, what gets checked and why a roadworthy is not enough, sits in our earlier post on what a pre-purchase inspection covers. This article is about the other side: what those checks turn up in the real world. Most used cars we inspect have at least three faults. Most are minor and easy to negotiate on. Some are deal-breakers.
The everyday list is short, predictable, and worth around $1,000 to $3,000 if you walk into it without knowing.
The everyday list above is what you negotiate on. The list below is what we look for harder, because getting one wrong turns a $20,000 car into a $40,000 mistake.
Most cars have been bumped at some point. The question is whether the damage was repaired properly and whether it affected anything structural. Our earlier post on whether a mechanic can tell if a car has been in an accident covers this in more depth. The short list is:
Most sellers are not hiding anything. They are selling a car they have driven daily for years and they have stopped noticing the things you would. A small oil weep, a slight steering pull, a faint exhaust drone, a brake squeal on the first stop of the morning. Things you live with do not feel like faults.
The other group is smaller but real. A seller who refuses an inspection, drops the price suddenly, or insists on a cash sale by the weekend is telling you something. So is a freshly-detailed engine bay on a private sale. Clean engines are not normal on a 10-year-old car; they are usually clean because something was being hidden.
The job of an independent inspection is to separate the two. A car with three honest faults is still worth buying at the right price. A car with one undisclosed structural issue is not, at any price.
A pre-purchase inspection in Melbourne costs between $220 and $350 for most cars at a workshop-based mechanic. Mobile inspections at the seller’s address run around $180 to $300. European cars, prestige models, and 4WDs sit at the upper end of either range because the diagnostics take longer.
What you get matters more than what you pay. A scan-only check (computer plugged in, fault codes read, no physical inspection) is $100 to $150 and tells you almost nothing about a modern car, because fault codes get cleared at start-up and the structural and wear issues never show on a scanner anyway. A full inspection should include:
Ask before you book.
Chandos Auto does pre-purchase inspections on cars across Cheltenham, Bayside and Kingston, on vehicles brought in from sellers anywhere across the south-east. The car comes to our Chandos Street workshop for the inspection. The buyer gets a written report by the end of the day, plus a phone call to talk through anything that matters.
A full workshop inspection takes around 90 minutes to two hours, including the road test, hoist check, scan, and history review. The written report usually lands with the buyer the same day.
Yes. Most of what gets found is easier to explain in person than over the phone, and buyers often have specific questions about a car they have already looked at twice. Call ahead so we know to expect you.
That is worth treating as a flag, not always a dealbreaker. Some genuine sellers do not want a stranger driving their car off-site. If they are open to it, ask whether you can pay to have the car towed to the workshop, or arrange a mobile inspector who can come to the seller’s address. If the seller refuses both, walk away.
Yes. A roadworthy certifies that the car meets minimum safety standards on the day it was issued. It does not check service history, engine wear, transmission condition, accident history, or anything that will not fail the car for safety. Our earlier post on what a pre-purchase inspection covers explains the difference in detail.
Back to the 2017 sedan. On a car like that, an inspection would usually find:
Worth knowing before you negotiate, not after.
If you have found a car worth a closer look, book a pre-purchase inspection before you put down a deposit. Walking away from a bad buy is free. Walking into one is not.
You ring up to book a service and the first thing you are asked is which one you want. Nobody explains the question, so most people guess. The short answer is that a logbook service follows the list your manufacturer wrote, a standard service follows the workshop’s own, and which you need comes down mostly to whether the car is still under warranty.
You get out of the car after a short trip and something smells hot. One wheel is far warmer than the others, but the brake pedal feels exactly as it always has. That combination usually points at a sticking brake caliper, and it will eat a set of pads and a disc while the pedal keeps telling you everything is fine.
You booked a service, and at the counter you were told the car would benefit from an engine flush or a fuel system clean on top. Neither one is scheduled maintenance, and a car serviced on time usually needs neither. Here is what each job involves, when it earns its money, and the three questions worth asking before you say yes.
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