Pre-Purchase Vehicle Inspections

Almost always, yes. An independent pre-purchase inspection is a normal part of a used car deal and most stores handle them without any friction. You tell your salesperson an inspector is coming, we call ahead, and we work around their schedule.

What we need is the seller’s permission, safe access and enough room to open the doors and hood. We do not need their bay, their lift or their tools.

If a store refuses an independent inspection outright, that tells you more than any report we could have written. Walk.

Because a certified inspection is performed by the business selling you the car. That is not an accusation, it is just how the incentive runs — a unit that fails the checklist usually gets reconditioned or sent to auction rather than shown to you, and the checklist you see advertised is the program’s, not this VIN’s.

Ask for the completed, signed checklist for the specific stock number you are looking at. Some stores produce it immediately, and that is a good sign. Many cannot.

Certification also has a scope. It covers what the program requires at the time of recon, which may have been weeks and several test drives ago. We inspect the car that is on the lot today.

That is a reasonable-sounding offer that gives you nothing. Their technician is competent, but they are employed by the party on the other side of the negotiation.

You are not questioning the technician’s skill by declining. You are declining to let one side of a deal grade its own work, which is ordinary practice in every other kind of transaction.

$349 per vehicle on a route day — the same rate in every metro we serve. A route day is simply a day we are already headed to your area; call or text and we will tell you the next one.

$449 for a dedicated dispatch, when you need it on a day that is not on the route and we come out for your vehicle alone.

Every additional vehicle inspected at the same dealership on the same visit is $199, and each one gets the full 121-point inspection and its own report.

No. A technician inspects the car in person and writes the report, and signs it.

There are services now that work from photographs you upload, with software producing the findings. That approach cannot measure anything — it cannot put a coating gauge on a door, plug a scan tool into the port, or drive the car. Every measurement on our report exists because somebody took it.

We do not object to the technology. We object to it being sold as an inspection when nobody went to the car.

Yes, and not as an extra. When the report is written the technician who wrote it calls you and goes through it — what was found, what matters, what it should cost and what to say at the dealership.

Every report records the date and time of that call and who it was reviewed with. That gets filled in and signed off, because the job is not finished until the conversation has happened.

If something comes up afterwards, call back. You are not opening a support ticket; you are ringing the person who was under the car.

Ask, and you will get an answer. It is the question almost everyone wants to put and it is a fair one.

The report already commits to a position — buy, buy with repairs, or walk away — so there is nothing to hedge about. On the call we will tell you what we would do in your position and why, including when the honest answer is that it depends on something only you can weigh, like how long you plan to keep it.

We have no stake in the outcome either way, which is what makes the answer worth anything.

That is most of what it is for. The findings are prioritized and each one carries an estimate for parts and labor, and page five sets the asking price against a suggested adjusted offer.

It changes the conversation at the desk. “It felt rough” is an opinion a salesperson can talk you out of. “Rear main seal is weeping, $890, here is the photo and the video” is a number they either discount, fix, or refuse — and all three answers tell you something.

Send the report to the sales manager before you go back in. It reads as documentation rather than haggling, and it tends to be received that way.

Before, whenever you can. A deposit changes the tone of every conversation that follows it, and some are harder to recover than the paperwork suggests.

If the store wants a deposit to hold the car while you arrange an inspection, get in writing that it is fully refundable if the inspection turns up something you are not willing to accept. Any store that will not put that in writing has told you what the deposit is really for.

That is exactly when this matters most. An as-is sale means every fault becomes yours the moment you sign, including the ones nobody disclosed because nobody looked.

Ohio, like most states, gives used car buyers no cooling-off period on a completed sale, so the inspection is the last point at which the car is still the dealer’s problem. We are not attorneys and this is not legal advice — read the buyer’s guide in the window and ask the store to explain anything in it you do not follow.

Most stores allow a road test with a salesperson along, and dealer plates and their insurance normally cover it. We run the full 20-point road test whenever that is permitted — cold start through post-drive leak check.

Some stores restrict the route or the distance. We work within whatever they allow and record exactly what we were able to do.

If the car cannot be driven at all, we say so in the report rather than implying it passed. A used vehicle a store will not let you drive is a finding in itself.

No. This is a mobile inspection performed where the vehicle is parked, so the undercarriage is assessed from the ground. Anything we could not reach or see is written into the report as not tested rather than quietly skipped.

Dealerships have lifts but will rarely hand one to an outside inspector, and their insurance is usually the reason. What you get instead are two things a quick recon inspection often leaves out: coating-gauge paint readings on all eleven panels, and a full module scan that catches permanent codes and incomplete readiness monitors.

Because we count honestly. Those larger counts are real numbers, but they are counted finely — split “tires” into four corners and it becomes four points, split “exterior lights” into seven bulbs and it becomes seven. Nobody did more work.

We publish all 121 items on this page, in the same order they appear on the report, so you can check one against the other. Very few sellers quoting a bigger number will publish theirs.

A coating gauge measures how thick the paint is on each panel. Factory paint falls in a predictable range, and a resprayed panel or one with filler under it reads well outside it.

It matters on a dealer lot in particular because used inventory arrives from auction and trade, gets reconditioned to look its best, and the bodywork is often genuinely good. Panel gaps can be reset and blend lines can be buried. Coating thickness does not hide. We take a baseline off the roof, which is rarely refinished, and measure every other panel against it.

The readings go in as measurements, not verdicts. Thickness can come from factory finishing or a dealer touch-up as easily as from collision repair, and we say so.

A history report only knows what was reported to it. Damage repaired privately, paid for out of pocket, or never claimed does not appear. A clean report on a car reading 14 mils of paint on one door tells you something on its own.

Send us the Carfax or AutoCheck the store gave you and we will read it against what the car actually shows. We do not purchase history reports for you.

No. We inspect the vehicle where it sits and send you the report, so this works whether you are at work, in another city or buying from out of state.

For out-of-town buyers that is usually the whole point — you find out what the car is before you book a flight or a tow.

No. We have no financial interest in the vehicle and nothing to gain from the outcome. The report is the product — it says buy, buy with repairs, or walk away, and it puts a dollar figure next to each finding so you can negotiate with it.

The estimates exist to tell you what the car will really cost, not to route work back to us.

Ours is a straight answer: we do inspection work for dealers too — auction buys, trade appraisals and recon scoping — and you are entitled to know that before you hire us.

So the rule is simple. We will not inspect a car for you at a store we are currently working for. If you name a dealership and we have a relationship with it, we tell you before you pay, and you decide.

The report is the same document either way. It is measurements, photographs and a signature, and the numbers do not know who is reading them.

A full written report, signed by the technician who inspected the car, covering all 121 rated checkpoints, 29 written measurements, a prioritized findings list with estimated parts and labor, the asking price against a suggested adjusted offer, and a clear recommendation.

It includes a mandatory 18-photo set that can run to 40 images, plus video for noises and faults a still picture cannot show. The evidence sits inside the report itself, so the version you send the sales manager is the same one you read.

Payment is taken when you book, which holds your appointment and your slot on our route.

Reschedule or cancel for a full refund up to 24 hours before your appointment time. After that the slot is committed and the fee is non-refundable. If the store sells the unit before we get there, tell us as early as you can and we will move your booking to the next car rather than keep the fee.

We cover several metro areas and the communities between them, at the same rate on a route day. The service area page has the current list, and each metro has a page of its own.

If the dealership you are buying from sits outside all of that, call or text and we will tell you straight away whether we can reach it and what it would cost. We travel further than people expect for a car worth inspecting.