Do NOT Buy A Used Car In Costa Rica Without Reading This First – Your life may depend on it.

We were in the market for a used car in Costa Rica and decided that even though we might have to pay a little more by buying from a used car dealer as opposed to buying from an individual, we could see a much wider selection in a shorter space of time.

We were particularly interested in cars that had recently come from the USA as we could check on their history through an online car history investigation service such as CarFax.com

The dealers make a brisk business buying cars at auction in the USA, bringing them here and selling them para inscribir. The purchaser has to register the vehicle at the Public registry.

Daily we went car hunting in the greater San José area. We rejected many cars that had obviously been patched up and selected those that roughly filled our requirements. We wrote down their characteristics, price and most importantly their VIN number. (This is located on the dashboard, visible from the outside through the windshield.)

At the end of the day we’d come back and get on the internet and one by one check each car’s history. Every day we’d find we’d wasted the day selecting cars that had been involved in major accidents, or had the odometer rolled back substantially.

After about a week of visiting over 40 dealers, and selecting after careful checking more than thirty cars after rejecting many more, we found only one car that did not have major camouflaged damage or a substantial mileage rollback.

96% of the used cars we checked at 40 different dealers in Costa Rica had their odometers altered.

I compiled a little spreadsheet of the results. We were unable to find complete information on some of the cars and in a couple of cases we were sloppy getting the claimed mileage on the car, recording it as “low”, so those vehicles are not included in the spread sheet.

We ended up with 26 cars imported from the US of which only one had the odometer reading correct. Of the rest, five had been bought with ‘Salvage titles’, i.e. an insurance company had written them off to be sold for parts.

The other twenty all had significant mileage rollbacks, the most egregious example being a vehicle that claimed to have 76,000 miles but when it left the US it already had 220,066 on the odometer according to CarFax.com

By this time we quit looking at dealers. We thought about looking at only cars that had been originally sold as new in Costa Rica, or some of the used Korean imports. But if our sample showed that virtually all US second hand imports have had the mileage rolled back, why would we expect cars from other countries be any different?

There may be honest dealers out there, but we didn’t find one. Unfortunately the crooked dealers will drive the honest ones out of business. Most of the people who buy second hand cars are people of modest means who can’t afford to buy new. For these people a car is a huge investment.

It is a disgrace that crooks can make buckets of money fleecing people by representing patched up paint jobs as low mileage cars.

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As in most cases, the way to empower consumers, and reduce shameless misrepresentation is to educate them. It is very easy and inexpensive to check a car’s history on line if it originated in the US or Canada.

There are several online services. The one we used was CarFax.com which charges only US$20 to look up one vehicle’s history, or $25 for a subscription to look up multiple vehicles for a period of one month. $20 is a lot of colones, but in proportion to the price of a used car it is insignificant.

Written by Robert Evans, VIP Member of WeLoveCostaRica.com and resident of Costa Rica.

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Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.