CARFAX vs. AUTOCHECK

I have found Autocheck to be much better than Carfax. Autocheck will report things that Carfax misses, the most important of which is "damage history" that may not be reflected in the title. I do not have any association with either company, I am merely a user of their services and I am passing this info on to prospective Porsche buyers.
http://www.autocheck.com http://www.carfax.com

[This message has been edited by orbmedia (edited 12-13-2000).]

Does anyone know how to get a title check on the early 911's. My car does not have the required 17 characters in the vin number to do a check. My Vin number is 9110120303.
thanks



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Martin
'70 911T

I wrote carfax about my 75 914 and they said those old numbers weren't in the database...I guess it's from ...the late 70s or early 80s and upward only (the ones with letters etc).
Maybe someday they'll import such records, I dunno.

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Kurt B
1984 911 Carrera Cabriolet
75 914 1.8

Orbmedia:

Just for kicks, I did an Autocheck on a 911 that I was looking at about 6 months ago to compare Carfax with Autocheck. When I first looked at the car last summer it was OBVIOUS that it had been in a MAJOR collision (so bad, in fact, that the drivers side front fender TORE and needed to be re-welded...I could only verify this by removing some of the interior carpetting etc. in the front end). The targa top had been replaced by one that didn't fit, and in the right light, you could see that most of the 2/3rds from the front end on back were "bondoed". This may take the cake as being the WORST car I've ever seen in my life. Aside from this, the car was leaking oil like a gusher. It looked OK on a sunny day but when looked at on a cloudy day, anyone with even minor inspection capabilities (like me) could tell the car was in poor shape.

A carfax check didn't show up anything unusual on it, and neither did autocheck. However, the Carfax report had almost twice as many entries for reporting the transfer of the vehichle, and you could tell it was a leased vehicle for several years. Some of the transfers that showed up on Carfax implied the title may have been washed.

This isn't to knock Autocheck. I don't think I'd imply one service is better than the other. My advice would be to do BOTH checks on a candidate car...better safe than sorry, and the two services do seem to address differing sources of data.

If a car gets totalled at a dealership, it's not uncommon for the extent of the wreck damage to not get reported. Dealers know that they can hack a car back together for less than $1000 dollars and then pass it off to an unaware consumer like there was either nothing wrong with the car, or the damage was a mild fender bender. My experience has been that a lot of the low volume dealers often have extremely high deductables for cars which means it's much cheaper for them to have some hack put it back together cheaply and just raise the price of what they expect to get on the car by that much more money. Sad but true.

It also points out the need for a real inspection, particularly when the car is suspected of being in a wreck.

Good Luck,

Bill Wagner