First the rant: In the summer of 2004, I bought a 1998 Toyota 4-Runner from an individual who advertised in a local paper. Being a savvy buyer, I ran a CarFax report on the VIN number which came up clean. I also spent $350 to have a Toyota dealer mechanic check it out who also gave it a clean slate. I spent what was an average Blue Book price for it at the time. The car had many abnormal repairs over the next four years. Most of them are strange electrical problems that baffle the mechanics. Once the car started missing out so badly it hardly ran at all. After considerable effort, the mechanics decided to replace the gas tank. When they removed the original, they discover a couple of inches of a mud-like sludge at the bottom of the tank. It's amazing that car ever ran, they said. I was happy to finally sell the car on a trade-in when I got the news from the dealership, this car has been totaled.

What!!?? Who??!! When!!??

So the dealer showed me the CarFax report and sure enough, it said the car was reported totaled in 2002, 2 years before I ran my CarFax report on it and bought it. And most interestingly, there was another line right next to the line about it being totaled in 2002 that said, This information was reported to CarFax in 2007.

What!!?? Who??!! When!!??

So a car I bought in 2004 and got a clean CarFax report on turns out to have been totaled in 2002, a small little fact not reported by CarFax until 2007, which makes the vehicle practically worthless in 2008 (not to mention expensive and dangerous to own for four years). I got scammed. There are many lessons from this experience, but the rest of this post will talk about things related to CarFax because after all, it is a web service and web services are cool so how could one be bad?

I hate to admit it, but the first lesson here is something my kids Grandmother tells me all the time, don't believe everything you get from the Internet. As a computer geek, I tend to forget that advise from time to time. Of course, the advise is meant to be targeted against Wikipedia and I get caught up in my explanations to people why Wikipedia tends to be a fairly accurate source. In the case of this car, I started the car appraisal process using Edmunds, a service I've always liked when buying or selling a car. There was a link to CarFax at the Edmunds site and back in 2002, the cost for the service was $19.95. I'm sure the promotional language was similar then as it is now, promising you greater comfort in knowing what you were buying, so I gave up a credit card number and VIN and got the report with a clean bill of health. In my defense, I didn't completely believe the report so I did have a mechanic check it out (or at least I paid one to). But if the CarFax report I bought had told me the car had been totaled, I most certainly would never had bought the car!

So what then is the value of a CarFax report? In my case, none! Maybe even negative value because it gave me false confidence. But maybe it kept someone else from making the same mistake I made. I certainly hope so. It would be a shame to find out that all data reported by CarFax is 5 years after the fact as it was in my case. My biggest issue now with CarFax is the false impression of confidence their offering implies.

So the Web is a terrible thing, isn't it? I think that is the other lesson learned. No, the Web is neutral, it is just how we use it that makes it good or bad. What I didn't do but should have was check out CarFax in advance. A quick search found this article (there are many more like it). I'm sure there were other such warning signs about CarFax back in 2004 had I just looked for them. So like any platform for commerce, there are some good players and bad players. The advantage of the Web is it helps you tell one from the other easier if you take the time to look.