Before we purchase a vehicle to sell on our lot at Cars and Credit—whether from an individual, a trade, a local auction—our mechanic inspects them all. He gives them a quick look-over. If the vehicle looks good, we get it and bring it to our service center from wherever we purchased it.
At that point, he does his multi-point inspection. He checks the oil level, transmission fluid, windshield wipers, antifreeze, brakes, windows, tires, anything like that. We also use AutoCheck—a detailed report on the condition of the vehicle, such as where it’s been, if it’s been in any accidents, had salvaged titles, any rollbacks in the odometer. It has a lot of information for that vehicle’s history.
By the time vehicles go out onto our lot for sales, is in better condition than anything someone could find by a seller off the street, and very much like buying a newer, used car. There’s a lot of competition, so we make sure that every vehicle is in great condition and great quality for our customers. Sometimes after the customer purchases a vehicle—whether it’s a few months or years—something that goes wrong with the car. Our customers can bring it in to our service center to get repairs taken care of.
So far, we have one mechanic, so everything must be scheduled. If the repair is something that’s rather expensive and most likely out of the customer’s budget we offer a side note. There’s no interest to that side note. It’s just something we do to keep them in the vehicle. They make small, weekly, monthly payments—however they get paid—they’ll pay extra on their side notes. We require 20% of the cost of the repair up front.
The thing is that we go to every possible length we can to sell quality vehicles and keep our customers in them. We can’t sell a poor quality vehicle right off the bat or else we’re not going to get paid if we keep a customer in a car that’s not running. We make sure that the car we’re selling is good quality, and if there are issues, we’re here to help get our customer back on the road.
Every vehicle we sell comes with free oil changes every three months, done by our in-house mechanic.
