How BROKEN are wholesale cars at dealer auctions?

if you're not willing to sign your name to every car you repair maybe you're in the wrong industry [Applause] [Music] i am a mechanic but it's not your typical mechanical job it's different in just about every way i work for a wholesale auction house which is where dealers go to buy cars from other dealers i came the first week the new owner took over the business and the way i got the job was the dealer the owner of the auction also owns a car lot and they had a volkswagen beetle in there one day and the alternator went out if you ever done an alternator on a new beetle the whole front end has to come off the car to get it off so i had left my job at seven o'clock one night went to the dealership worked till two in the morning replaced the alternator put the whole front and back on the volkswagen the owner comes the next morning hey jason i see you took my check but you didn't finish the car i'm like yeah i did the old alternator's in the box new ones on the car send the customer out and it was a couple months later changing that alternator on that volkswagen in the middle of the night got me a recommendation for what i would consider almost a dream job overnight i went from working out of a one car almost dirt floor garage because the concrete was that bad to having an eight car garage with heat brand new lights two lifts that i was in complete control of it was the best thing ever because it allowed me to progress my own cars but it's tremendous in the stuff you have to go through i'm not only responsible for maintaining a fleet of chase vehicles to drive all over the state of ohio to pick up cars and bring back i've got to maintain the rollback i got to fix every dealer's car that comes through and on auction day i'm responsible for handling arbitrations and if you're a car dealer and you've ever dealt with an arbitration at an option it's not the best thing in the world and in some auction houses i've heard that you can actually as an arbitrator be fired for not arbitrating or arbitrating too many cars because that's lost profit i don't do it that way i'm honest as it can be if your cars are betrayable it's getting arbitrated if your car's not irbitratable you just bought a car that needs a lot of work because in the auction industry there's different levels of guarantee when you go to buy a car you got as-is which is if it breaks in two you own two halves you got auction guarantee which is lower engine and drive train covers your transmission rear end four-wheel drive front end transfer case then you have ride and drive and that's very rarely nowadays you see a lot of cars where i work run ride and drive because they have to be the creme de la creme because anything over 700 repair on that car it gets canceled because you need to announce that and basically my job is to make sure the buyer and the seller are both being honest in an arbitration i got to make sure that the seller is properly representing the car and the buyer is being honest about why he doesn't want the car quite often you'll get buyer's remorse you'll get a deal get at the auction buy two or three cars at the beginning and then buy several cars at the end and he'll eat up all his money for his floor plan and he doesn't have the money to actually pay for them cars that day so what they'll do is hey let's put two of these in arbitration i'll pay for the four i'll sell these four over the weekend come back monday and get the two out of arbitration and have the money to pay them all there's a series of things i had to learn um if you have someone walking around with a gatorade bottle if that's green gatorade that might be antifreeze in that bottle they'll take it and dump it under a car if they want so when someone comes by they'll look and hey that car's leaking antifreeze i don't want that no that's lemon lime gatorade there's a series of things um i learned that if you got timing codes in a car crankshaft with camshaft correlation what do you do purposely destroy the camera crank position sensor so it can't get a correlation code so all you'll get is a camshaft position code and that's not rubber tradable but in reality the timing chains are bad but the computer doesn't know it because it doesn't have the three points of information the two cams and the crank it needs to know that everything's out of time you get people who will bring cars have rusty frames and won't announce it i get that a lot i've got tons of pictures of frames that are in two and pieces um some of them are completely wi-fi you got a car here and the frame lane over here my first major incident at the dealership i can remember was a white cts cadillac come in shifting very hard the owner comes in it gets arbitrated and the seller is upset i mean he is livid he comes in he looks at me like jason jason jason i understand check engine light on airbag light on brake light on this light on but it's good car i'm like no no dude your car is very bad and unfortunately for me the car refused to mess up on the second test drive but sure enough as that seller was gone five minutes later the transmission messed up again so here i am fixing a cts that i didn't want to because it wouldn't mess up at the right time when i needed it to the different levels of guarantees have different time limits auction guarantee is you have till five o'clock the day of the auction to report any issues with the car ride and drive you have till noon the next business day for us there's a bonus for that because our auctions are on friday next business day is monday so that dealer has the whole weekend to find out what's wrong with your car and then return it on monday if you're dishonest about it so if that comes to be the dealer needs to bring the car back to me and leave me alone for one because you're not gonna be over my shoulder directing my arbitration on your car you don't want so i bring it back and quite often i don't like to know what's wrong with the car because that's leading you to an answer i like to bring the car back to the garage and look it over and see what i find on my arbitration papers it kind of gives me a directional where to go hard shift noise in the engine it'll bring it back to me i inspect it honestly and subjectively i don't get along with dealers but my job is my job and no one should have to pay for a car that was misrepresented i'll bring it back i'll scan it test drive it it all depends on what's wrong with the car if i find that the buyer is telling the truth and there is something wrong with the car that wasn't represented at the time of the auction the car is going to be arbitrated and then the buyer has to take that car back that can get tricky sometimes because a seller can be thinking they're coming to the auction to pick up their 10 000 check for their car well they can come to the auction and find out they're going to pick up their equinox with a bad transmission and they do not normally take that well at all and a lot of guys you find in the car industry are 50 years plus stable and they do not like looking at a young kid telling them your car's not good you can't sell it you're not getting your 10 grand i hate having people not like me but i've had to come to terms with it being an arbitrator at a wholesale auction house i'm not there to make friends i'm there to make money and make the best decision possible at my auction um i would say roughly 75 of them are truthful because we're a small auction house we're not known mannheim or columbus fair or anything like that we're a little house so we deal with the newer dealers the guys that are just starting out and we have several new car dealerships that we bring in that get that's what the little guys want the little guys with the car lot on the corner used to be the gas station they want that new car trade in from the major dealer so that's where your your bread and butter is in it the problem is with that is most your major dealers nowadays are running their cars as is so they ain't got to worry about their car you know being returned they just want to sell these cars and be done with them because that's not really where they make their money they make their money on the new car sales and they just need to get the inventory off their lot and gone that's my dream because most of your new car store cars are good cars but even if there is something wrong with it it's your car because it's as is now that's not always the case literally yesterday in my shop right now at home i've got two terrains sitting there with bad timing chains in them one as is one auction guarantee here's the problem even when it's as is the dealer can just be like yeah i don't want that car i'm never coming back here again and that's literally what happened friday with the terrain like i don't want i just i won't come here anymore so now i've got a train come monday morning i'm putting timing chains in just so the auction doesn't eat the 3 300 because we're not going to go back on the seller and tell the seller hey man you can't have your money for the car because the buyer flaked as an auction we will eat the car i will repair the problem and then we will turn around and resell it for quite often break even there's very very few times as an auction house we make a profit on a repair we make a repair to help facilitate the car being sold as it's ran i'm getting older i'm not exactly a big dude i'm five seven buck fifty on a good day and um working at a major dealership it's go go go go and i've found that them places will eat you up and spit you out like you're a disposable commodity and where i'm at now the owner of the auction house hired me actually for for two years the owner of the auction told me you cannot ball i'm going with you the problem was is when i got the invite like most people your co-driver well i didn't think you were serious and it very much became that way so for him he knows me he knows the limitations he's not going to run me in the ground and kick me out because he actually used to own several repair facilities along with the dealership and he knows what a good mechanic and what a bad mechanic is and he knows i'm trustworthy i'm reliable i'm honest and i think nowadays what makes me better the most is i care if you don't if you're not willing to sign your name to every car you repair maybe you're in the wrong industry you know you should be able to oh jason atkins or this guy built that car or did this for me nowadays people just don't care it's get it out the door and get it done so being at the auction house for me i'm somebody at the auction house i'm not a nobody at a major dealership just some guy back in the corner and not so much when i started but now the local car dealers respect my word when i first started out they wouldn't listen to me for nothing so we actually brought in a um 78 year old mechanic that used to work but he's kind of semi-retired because they all know him and if donnie would go to these people and tell them you know your transmission does have issues they will look at donnie and be like thank you donnie i understand you're still to me you know that's just the way it is you don't want to hear bad news from a young kid you want to hear from someone you think has the experience we'd like to thank avalon king for their continued support of the vinwicki youtube channel from crazy projects like casey's k-zero to shooting derelict amg cars off of a cliff in alaska they're interested in a whole lot more with respect to the automotive hobby than just making our cars look great but the ceramic coating is awesome and you can get it look for 25 off at the link in the description below so be sure to check it out try it on your car let us know what you think in the comments and let them continue to support idiots like us

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,301,583

Rating: 4.9259782 out of 5

Keywords: auction, dealer, car, auto, wholesaler, trade ins, arbitration, quality, floorplan, car dealers, vinwiki, car stories, car sales, profit, mechanic, job, dream job, vehicle history, cadillac cts, rust, damage, tricks, scams

Id: 6E6mCOw03FU

Length: 11min 51sec (711 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 17 2020