One Recall in Eleven Ends With an Inspection and No New Part.
The word recall implies a part being changed. In a rising share of campaigns the remedy is somebody looking at the car and deciding it is fine.
10,662 Complaints Mention a Service Bulletin. Most Owners Never Learn One Exists.
Between a fault nobody has acknowledged and a recall that everybody hears about sits a third category: known, documented, and never announced.
Complaints Saying "I Bought It New" Outnumber "I Bought It Used" More Than Two to One.
Defects are documented by the person who bought the car new and lived with it for three years. The person who buys it next gets the fault and not the paperwork, which is a problem worth understanding before you shop.
931 Complaints Come From Certified Pre-Owned Cars. The Top Two Faults Are Engine and Gearbox.
Certification costs the buyer real money and is sold as peace of mind. The complaints filed by people who paid for it point at a specific and predictable limitation.
12,007 Owners Reported a Surge or a Lurch. 7,186 Were Told the Fault Could Not Be Reproduced.
A workshop can only repair what it can observe. For a whole class of faults that is the entire problem, and it leaves the owner holding a car that misbehaves only when nobody official is watching.
9,262 Complaints Mention Rain. A Quarter of Them Are About Not Being Able to See.
Rain does not break cars. It exposes the parts nobody checks before buying, and the complaint record is unusually specific about which ones.
The First Year of a New Model Gets 5% Fewer Recalls, Not More
Every buying guide repeats it: wait for the second year, let them fix the problems. We have the recall and complaint history for hundreds of models, so the rule is testable — and it does not survive.
3,665 People Search for a Charger for Every One on Sale
Everyone knows which cars are popular. Far fewer know which popular cars are actually hard to find, and those are different lists — one is about interest, the other about what happens when you go looking.
Houston Asks $10,761. El Paso Asks $14,948. Same State.
Everyone assumes the big city is the expensive market and the drive is worth it. Inside three large states the biggest metro is often the cheapest, and the gaps that do exist come from what is parked there rather than local pricing.
Sixteen Cities Hold Half the Used Market. 190 Share the Rest.
Every piece of car-buying advice assumes you can compare listings. In most of the country you cannot — there are not enough of them, and a thin market changes what a fair price even means.
9.5% of the Market Is Under $3,000. Here Is What You Get.
The bottom of the market is bigger than most buyers assume and far less random than it looks. The cars down there are strikingly consistent — same models, same age, same mileage — which tells you what actually survives to get there.
There Are 20 McLarens for Sale in America. There Are 71,161 Fords.
A used market is supposed to be a mirror of what people bought. Sort 413,888 listings by badge and the mirror turns out to have some very thin spots — and a spelling problem nobody talks about.