Car paint matters. It’s not just so you can look hip & sporty with candy-apple red or sleek and classy with sheer black. Paint is a key part of our 110-point inspection process when buying used vehicles.

Why?

Checking a vehicle’s paint job is one of the many ways we verify its history and quality. If a vehicle has been repainted, we know it has an unclear history which may reflect something as minor as having been keyed or something as major as a serious accident.

As we explain in our post, “Why Don’t You Have My Color?”, we pick our cars based on pure quality – not based on color. That means we eliminate any cars we’ve found to have been painted outside the original factory.

Here’s a peek into our buying process: 

Say our buyers are looking at Mercedes C300’s. When we’re at the Mercedes sale, we find 50 Mercedes C300’s available for us to purchase. So our next step is a quality check. We’ll meticulously assess each of those 50 cars and isolate only those vehicles that meet our high standards for quality. After doing the quality check, only 10 out of those 50 cars may end up meeting our requirements. And out of those 10, perhaps only three cars were aligned with our market assessment (to give you the best price). 

So out of 50 cars, we purchased three because those were the only cars that met our high-quality and great value requirements – including original factory paint.

When it comes to a car's color, you have to know what matters – excellent quality.

 Image by frankieleon via Flickr, licensed under CC BY