I wanted to post a brief memoir to my 1992 Volvo that I recently got rid of. The car served me well but also left me with a story to tell.
Normally, I drive around in some kind of company car, rarely do I have to purchase my own vehicle. I had lost my job and therefore lost my car. I had just gotten rid of my spare car because I did not want it sitting around. I didn’t plan on driving much and if I did I had intended to just get another company car so I just bought a cheap car to get me by. That car was a 1992 Volvo.
I bought the car because it was really affordable and it had low mileage, it also had current registration tags that were recently renewed and therefore smogged. I found the car on craigslist.
To this day I am amazed at how wrong all of the features that I listed above were. Here are some of the discrepencies.
First of all, I mentioned that I had purchased the car on caigslist. When I went to test drive the car it was an extremely awkard situation. I called the guy to go see the car and he told me to meet him in front of the house that he had listed in craigslist, as it turns out, this was not his house and when I got to the address I had to wait outside in my car for him to arrive at the address. The address was at a house off of International Blvd in Oakland (scary), I ended up waiting for the guy across the street from the house in the parking lot of a liquor store (more scary). I got to the address at around 6:30pm and the guy kept calling every 10 or 15 minutes to say he was coming. To make matters worse, I had brought my 5 year old son with me to look at the car. As usual, after 20 minutes of waiting he had to go to the bathroom. All of the businesses that were around me appeared to not to have a bathroom so we walked about a block to a gas station that did not have a bathroom for the public but was kind enough to let my son use what they had. As it turns out, the guy with the car shows up while we were gone looking for a bathroom and I missed his phone call. When we got back to where I was parked the guy was gone. I called him again to see where he was and he sounded upset that I was not there and said that he would be right down. Nobody that we encountered spoke very good English and we were approached by no less than three homeless people asking for money.
By the time the guy showed up with the car it was starting to get dark (in a scary neighborhood). I was slightly rattled from the experience so far and gave the car a quick one or two block test drive with the guy and all appeared OK. The car was priced low enough and I wanted to get the hell out of there so we made a quick deal and I got out of there. I drove the car home about 30 miles or so and was pleased with my purchase. The car seemed to do it’s job. I went home and went to bed.
The next day I went to get the car registered so I went to the DMV. Slowly, I started to find out some of the things that were suspicious about the car. I had something to put in the trunk before I left and found out that the trunk would not open. When I started driving to the DMV I noticed that the speedometer did not appear to be working correctly, it would work intermittenly between my house and the DMV. When I got to the DMV I had a few more problems. I took a look at the title and noticed that the mileage was off. The odometer on the car said that it had 120,000 miles on the car and the registration was showing 140,000 miles. Somehow, the car had lost 20,000 miles? At the DMV I also learned that it had a fake registration. Apparently, the previous owner had gone to the DMV a few weeks prior and tried to get the car registered for the new year. I still don’t know exactly how they did it, but they went in and got a current registration for the car and on the bottom of the registration there was a balance due. The previous owner must have gone through the trouble to get the car registered and even gotten a registration slip but never paid for it. At the time that I purchased the car everything appeared OK (at first glance) because the registration looked current and it had new current tags on the license plates. When I asked the DMV about the current tags I learned that they were stolen tags. This ended up meaning that the car had not been registered for at least a year and it need to be smogged and needed new tags. I started to worry that the car may have been stolen but apparently it had not. I left the DMV and went to get the car smogged, luckily it passed. About $200 later the car was appernetly legally owned by me.
The car served me well for about a year. I never got the trunk fixed and the speedometer just started working somehow. Recently, while I was waiting at a stop light, a car rear-ended me. I was surprised because the Volvo barely had a scratch but the car that hit me was totalled. This made me very happy that I had a Volvo.
A few days later I took the car in to the insurance adjuster and he declared my car totalled. He offered me a lower amount at first but I saw this as an opportunity to get rid of the car and took it. I ended up getting $1000 more for the car than I had originally paid for it. I had to go through a little hassle because of the mileage, but somehow that got worked out and I was able to get rid of the car.
The car served me well for about a year but I learned an important lesson when buying a car. Don’t take anything for granted, you never know when you could be dealing with a crook. It worked out OK for me this time, but it seems like I was a little too close to trouble the entire time. Next time I will be more alert.