Good used car dealerships
So I need to buy a car and i'm looking to find a trustworthy place to get a used. I'm willing to travel as far as brantford
Posted Apr 7, 2018, 4:02 PM UTC
211
Fitzgerald is pretty good the one time I went there.
1
Also had a good experience with Fitzgerald Motors.
1
Murray's garage, Guelph. Awesome team!
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Martin's garage in st Jacob's. Small lot of cars that turn over fairly quickly. I use them as my mechanic and they're always honest and straightforward.
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Foreign Automotive in Kitchener if you’re looking for German.
1
Jason and his team are great. I take my Toaureg there when I need work done.
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We went to http://shopwilsons.com in Guelph and liked it a lot
1
Quality on Manitou might be one to stay away from, I bought a car there a while back. It seemed slightly below market price from the research I had done and I asked what the reason for that was, if there was something wrong, if it had been in an accident, etc. expecting full disclosure. I just got a lame line about how they just want to cut to the chase and no-haggle pricing, good deals sell themselves etc. etc. AFTER all the paper work was done (they had done a hard pull on my credit the invoice was made, all that) they had me sign the sales form and he quickly ripped through all the disclosure stuff that it had been a rental car. Of course by this time you're pretty much emotionally invested and I think they count on that, and I completed the sale. But that explains the lower price. Also, the salesman was very careful not to say that it hadn't been in any accidents but that it had a clean carfax. I found out later that many rental car companies self insure and (aside from having the piss driven out of them potentially) rental cars in accidents are often repaired by the rental company themselves and no claim is filed, so there isn't a record of it on carfax. The car has been fine, but I would not give them 5 stars for trustworthiness.
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Avoiding saying it's been in an accident, and instead saying the history report is clean.. is a classic move to trick you.
Theo Motors in Kitchener did this to us. I even asked them after they said the report is clean, if when they inspected the car did they see signs of an unreported accident that had been fixed, and they avoided the question and restated the report was clean. I also asked if the car came from Quebec where accidents may not show up on the report, and he said the car was first registered in Ontario on this date.. completely side stepping the question. We ended up buying the car because it was really clean (a 2 year old 2009 Mazda3 with 44,000km). When I got home, I read the history report in depth, and one of the first pages showed it was 'initially registered out of province where not all accidents are reported the same and may not show up on this report' or something to that effect. That's when it dawned on me that when he showed us the history report, he showed us specific pages and hid the parts I was specifically asking about.
A few days after owning the car (it was late Dec when we bought it), the driver door lock started freezing - the door wouldn't unlock. I removed the door panel to grease the lock rods. Mazda3's have a plastic barrier that deflects any water that gets past the window seals over the lock rods. This sheet was on the wrong side of the rods. Upon closer inspection the driver door had been reskinned.
That said, after fixing the door lock with grease and moving the plastic, we haven't had any problems with the car, and still have it. It's time to replace it, but we will not be going to Theo Motors for its replacement.
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I second staying away from Theo motors
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I got a Sentra from Garston years ago. They were polite and worked quickly (got me a car in 2ish days) but the car itself had a weird dent on the gas door (which made opening and closing it difficult) that they didn’t tell me about and I didn’t notice until too late.