Carfax screwed me! Anybody have a similar experience?

Went to sell a 2007 Lexus GS 450h I’ve owned for 4 years and when I purchased it the owner had the carfax that was completely clear with all maintenance records. I have never had any issues with this car and carfax had added rear end damage/structural frame damage from 2009 it was added to the report 4/2018 THIS MONTH! My offer plummeted, the car has no damage to the frame and has never been in a wreck.

If the car did have a wreck in 2009 then I paid to much because of the clear carfax and I also get less for selling the car. I get smashed twice!

They have accuracy guarantee - afaik. File a claim against them based on the fact that their reporting was inaccurate 4 years ago and ask them to cover for loss of value

if you have a copy of the old carfax, you can file a claim. I believe car fax guarantees their reports with someone sort of a back back guarantee or compensation. But i still think you would need the copy of the old carfax

First ck with them and verify it’s not mistake which they can fix

Thanks for the info…

What sucks is the time frame and hassle. I don’t have the old car fax (I’m looking for it) and it’s not a quick fix even if I do have the report or get it fixed. Dealer says it will take weeks (if I’m lucky) to get it corrected. I even contacted the shop where the repairs were suppose to be done. The shop stated they don’t have any clue how that would be on the carfax and thy don’t have records from almostv10 years ago (new owners now)

Carfax is such a scam, when I use to be in the car business, we would get cars on trade in or bought at auction that clearly had been wrecked but the carfax was clean, and were talking whole front-end replaced. And then on the flip side you’d have a car with minor damage, maybe one panel replaced and that would show up as a major accident. Don’t trust Carfax, if you’re buying a used car take a really good look at the car, you might be able to spot previous repairs, I can but it comes from looking at hundreds of cars. If you’re not sure about a car have a mechanic look at it, they can usually spot it. Many cars have VIN stickers on every panel, also look at panel gaps, paint matching, missing trunk trim inside trunk, etc.

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Yeah I just found out my 2011 Hyundai Sonata, purchased at an actual Hyundai dealer, has frame damage. Carfax is clean - still is, but I took it to a mechanic and he put it on the lift and showed it to me. Said he was sure it would be a salvage. It’s possible it was never reported but either way the dealer must have known. I suppose this isn’t necessarily carfax’s fault (I think) but definitely shows you can’t put your faith in it 100%. Amazing thing is I actually paid a mechanic to look it over before I bought it and he said he saw a little bit of damage but nothing major. When this other mechanic showed me the damage you could see metal twisted.

Good luck!

It may take 6 months for damage to show on Carfax. If the previous owner sold it right after damage, chances are that it wouldn’t be on your Carmax.

This took 9years before it showed up. Damage was done in 2009 reported April 2018

It may not show up at all.

fighting carfax on it is going to be tough. Here are their terms for the buyback guarantee:
https://www.carfax.com/manifest/bbg/termsConditions.cfx

That’s why you should always lease cars???

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I do not believe in carfax its not always 100% accurate.

Ok, so I had a weird experience which led to me finding out some stuff about Carfax. I guess the first sign that something seemed fishy with their records was when I bought a 2000 S10 that had clean records but had obviously been in a wreck, but I digress.

A couple years ago my wife was driving our brand new CR-V and was in an accident. The other driver was found 100% at fault and all repairs to our vehicle were covered. The damage was significant and cost upward of $10k. Even though I paid nothing out of pocket, the thought crossed my mind that my vehicle suffered significant loss of resale value since the accident would be on the Carfax report. This led to discovery of something called “diminished value” claims. Most states allow for folks to claim diminished value in these situations to cover the loss of value beyond structural damage. I paid a guy $200 to write up a fancy report documenting how much less my vehicle was worth post-collision and started going after the other driver’s insurance company. It took a good 7 months before I ended up settling for $2500 to cover about half of what I started off asking for. The reason I had to settle for so much less was that nothing ever showed up on the Carfax report. This significantly damaged my negotiating power, but I guess it’s good that it’ll have a clean record.

Having a clean report was very strange to me since the accident was pretty severe. There was no frame damage, but the entire front end needed replaced. Anyway, I did quite a bit of digging to figure out why a bad accident that had been documented in a police report as well as insurance records, and body shop records didn’t show up in the Carfax report. It turns out that Carfax mostly relies upon law enforcement departments to provide records of accidents. They must pay departments a fee for access to partial reports. I doubt they have deals with all local departments and some smaller cities are probably pretty poor at sharing records even if they do have a deal in place. It doesn’t sound like they get much info from other sources. My body shop said that even if they did share info it’d just show up as being a service appointment. I don’t think insurance companies share info and the DMV doesn’t even keep track of those records in my state. All they did was record that my wife was in an accident and didn’t tie it to any particular vehicle. To sum it up, I think it’s good due diligence to get a Carfax report. However, that data should be taken with a grain of salt and you’d be wise to have a body shop look over any used car that you’re thinking of buying. Those guys are experts at picking up signs of repairs that were made. I’d rely more upon them than a mechanic for newer vehicles.

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I didn’t pay anyone and got $1,250, but it must be dependant on the amount of damage and car’s value. My damage was under $4k, I think.

I’d say the biggest factor is the value of your vehicle at the time of the collision. Mine was 1 year old and only had about 12k miles on it. After that, the amount of damage is probably the next biggest factor. Having some help from people who’ve been in the industry, like the guy who wrote my report, definitely helps.

Mine was a $30k sticker 6 months with provably less than 5k miles. I recall (but not completely sure) them saying that diminished was calculated as 5% of value.

When I was buying a used car last year I used Carfax reports to screen things out. If Carfax showed an accident I didn’t bother to look further at that vehicle. If the Carfax was clean I treated that as no evidence of anything and did my own checking when I saw the car. Cargurus lets you screen based on reported accidents which was helpful. That and not looking at anything with a salvage title removed about 10% of my options.

This was a high volume vehicle so I had a ton of them to chose from and I was looking for ways to quickly narrow down my options rather than trying to find an ultra-rare color or configuration.

Carfax is screwing me too. I bought a car brand new and now, 3 years latter, I’m trying to sell the car. The car fax report states it was in an accident and gave my a range of when the car was in an accident. 9 month of part of the range, the car was not even built… the other 3 months I had the car and did not have and accident . I filed a complaint with Carfax, and they told me to call the LAPD. LAPD told me to file a accident request form and I’ll take five weeks to get it . If there was a report at all. Now I can’t sell my car for a fare price.
Erick

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