Buying a car from a marketplace like Facebook or Craigslist can be simultaneously a lot of fun and just a huge headache. Positioned far toward the headache end of the spectrum is dealing with a car flipper. Now, some flippers sell good cars, but others are selling steaming piles of crap that they’re intentionally misrepresenting. There’s an easy way to get around that.
Today, the excellent Jim Motavalli wrote a piece on how title jumping can be painful for sellers and buyers alike. Aside from trying to sling a car with title issues, a flipper might be trying to sell a car they don’t actually know anything about. So, you may choose to avoid flippers entirely.
Cody offers a great way to weed out the flippers:
When I’m responding to a car ad I always start with “I’m interested in your car for sale…” That weeds out the guys flipping cars pretty quickly when they have to respond with “which one?”
If you’re on Facebook Marketplace, just scroll to the seller’s name and punch that screen. If the seller’s marketplace profile shows up with a million random cars for sale, they’re almost certainly a flipper or a dealer. Again, you might still find a decent car, but if you don’t want to mess with flippers, that’s how you figure them out.
The coolest way to show off some cool new car tech is with the cutaway, and some automakers go all of the way in chopping real cars up before filling them with people for their advertising. KYFire makes a hilarious observation:
That cut away of the Fiat 500 seems like a double-edged sword and a literal sword as well.
Double-edged in that by creating a view showing what CAN fit but maybe exposing too much of what you don’t get. Of course the point of the thing was to be cheap but this kind of exposure shows why that lady is pissed. They bought a car that barely fits adults in the front, utilizes a park bench for seats, and screams “any longer than a 30 minute ride is a trip to hell”.
Literal sword as in holy shit did the guy with the angle grinder not understand rounding a corner! The B pillar and rear window cuts are going to slice that little girl to pieces!
Smart owners used to joke that they got the rest of their cars after they finished making the payments. Finally, a former Waymo head seems to think Tesla might fake its robotaxi service. Where have we seen this before? From Livernois:
In a parallel situation, Elizabeth Holmes had cut a deal where Theranos actually had blood testing machines in a few drug stores.
Except they were fakes which didn’t do any testing. Theranos would send someone over to pick up the samples pulled by the machines and then take them to a regular lab for standard testing. Then they’d send results to customers pretending that they were from the supposedly automated blood testing machines.
What’s more, the blood draws the machines managed to perform had unacceptably high rates of flaws.
What’s crazy is that every reporter and editor in the tech world should know this based on the Wall Street Journal exposes, the book Bad Blood, and the related movies that came out. Almost none of them will connect the dots between Theranos and Holmes and Tesla and Musk, but they’ll all be offended if anyone points out how they’ve dropped the ball.
The more you learn about Theranos, the crazier it gets. Have a great weekend, everyone!
Topshot: Facebook/US Navy
🙂 I’ve usually skipped reading your COTD Mercedes (no idea why, I always enjoy everything else of yours I’ve read, even if I’m not in the market for some weird huge RV apparently sourced from a parallel universe) but I happened to read it today, and (of course) I enjoyed it.
So: thanks! 🙂
Great article I think a comparison to the scam in the 70s about 100 mpg car, can’t recall the name, but every journalist was all in but was kept at arms length that turned out to be a scam and a wood model.