The issue of carfax and the value people put on their reports has come up quite a few time for the purchasers of used cars. When they used to have the one month “pass”, since I was shopping for a used car, I bought an unlimited pass for a month. I used it to screen the potential candidate cars, so I don’t have to waste gas/money and time looking at cars that have obvious issues. I actually found it helpful. But today I received an e-mail to the following link for class action lawsuit.
Carfax is a marketing tool (nothing wrong with that0.
I’ve heard if there was no police report then there will be no carfax but if there was a pr then there is a good chance carfax knows.
That suit was apparently filed and settled here in OK and eight years later…
It would be interesting to know the middle names of the plaintiffs because the court records show a bit of a history in the courtroom; not only as plaintiff but also defendant.
There’s even been a suit against McDonalds so one wonders if the coffee was too hot…
Their advertising is so misleading. They claim that if there’s an accident or mechanical problem on a car they’ll know about it…Well that’s NOT true. The ONLY accidents or repairs they’ll know are the ones reported to them. How many independent mechanics on this board report every repair to carfax??? How many report ANYTHING to carfax. There is no other way for carfax to get that data.
Accident data is easier to get if you make a claim through your insurance company. Many insurance companies are linked with lexisnexis. It’s an insurance reporting bureau. But NOT all accidents are reported to them…just certain driver information.
Carfax has even admitted that they can only collect 5% of ALL accidents and repairs. But they sell it to you like they have information on ALL cars. And dealers are now using it as a marketing ploy to get you to buy a car from them. “Look it has a clean carfax report”. Which everyone knows means almost NOTHING.
IMHO Carfax is extremely and intentionally misleading, almost to the point of being an outright scam. Their ads now say “be sure you get all of the information that’s been repoorted to Carfax”. That technically keeps tham out of hot water, but they stil leave a bad taste in my mouth.
I agree with Texases, it is what it is and just use it as a tool and not gospel. I like to see the ownership chain and especially what states it came from. Anything from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Florida, are highly suspect of being wrecked before.
More interesting to me is who they are owned by. Is everybody owned by some holding company with foreign ties anymore? Isn’t anyone their own company anymore? If I were going to add another item on that list of things if I were king, it would be listing the ownership chains for companies on their labels and documents. Right down the line, Burger King and Arbys owned by the same folks. Chrysler owned by Fiat. Black and Decker and Porter Cable and probably Milwaukee now owned by the same people. And who owns Power Force that used to be Techumsee, and on and on. Sheesh.
You can use CarFax to eliminate some cars from the list easily and pay attention to the ones that don’t have a blemish on their public record. It could save you a few hundred bucks in prepurchase inspections.
Carfax is a tool to some extent but not nearly as much as proclaimed to be. However, I can’t see a lawsuit over it. The site’s homepage states (and has for quite a while) that they only report what is reported to them and that the potential buyer of a car should have a pre-purchase inspection done.
That 665k dollars divided into 3 dollar vouchers is meaningless and CF will make all of that plus attorney fees back PDQ.
Ok4450, I agree. A lawsuit is rediculous. It’s these kinds of lawsuits that drive insurance costs up, plug up civil courts needlessly, and often end up in very bad precident law. People do dumb stuff and people make big mistakes. somehow the system needs to have a feature to automatically disenable these frivolous lawsuits.
I skimmed the court records on that suit and have no intention of going through volumes of material but 8 years, a dozen lawyers, the Court of Appeals, the state Supreme Court, and the involvement of a bankruptcy in the proceedings which led to a determination of an amount due to both plaintiffs of “up to a 1000 dollars” seems like a lot of dog and pony show for such a small amount; lawyer fees omitted from the discussion of course.
Regarding frivolous lawsuits, it’s interesting sometimes to skim court records (easy to do here in OK online) and find out things that might have an influence on the filing of suits.
About a dozen years ago a guy who lives near here sued McDonalds after claiming to have found a rodent in his soft drink while out on the road. He apparently waited a while to say anything about this to anyone.
Court records show that he was; being foreclosed upon, possession of CDS, commission of a felony with a firearm, divorced, violated 3 Protective Orders, domestic violence in front of minors, and about 7 or 8 other less serious things.
It could have been assumed that he was looking for money to bail out a few financial problems and pay his attorneys for the constant parade of arrests but the suit in this case was tossed out with prejudice…
You have to remember that the frivolous lawsuits go both ways.
Some 40+ years ago when Burger King was making it’s way across the country…they moved into a small mid-west town where there was this small local burger place that the owner started when he got back from WWII. The place had a slogan “King of Burgers”. Well that didn’t sit too well with Burger King. So they sued them. This small grill couldn’t fight Burger King…and ended up going bankrupt trying to. Their lawyer fees to defend themselves was more then yearly income.
I agree we should stop ALL FRIVOLOUS lawsuits…NOT just the ones against big corporations.
I’m in total agreement with you Mike. I vaguely remember reading a story several years ago that was similar to the Burger King tale although I don’t remember the particulars.
In this case the guy with the small business was being run over by a larger company which was using the same name although the small time guy had been using the name for a long time prior to the large company adopting it.
The 800 pound gorilla simply overwhelmed the little guy with legal filings until he gave up the name.
While the following is a tragic situation, I’m not sure that this suit is legit either considering the tire repair was peformed almost a year before the accident. My gut feeling is that the owners never owned a tire gauge or ever checked tire pressure.
In the future, if anyone thinks they’re being ripped off because a shop will not repair a tire and recommends a new tire, or full set, then this will be the reason why.
how many times do we get the question asking if they’re being ripped off because the tire shop wants them to replace all 4 tires on their Subaru when they get a nail in 1 of them.
