Subaru buyers guide - 10 things you NEED to know before buying!

hi guys welcome back to the channel today i'm going to be filming a subaru impreza buyers guide now why would i feel qualified to make an impressive buyer's guide well this is my third impreza and the first two i had really bad experiences with because i bought them and i missed major major things which i should have spotted um i pretty much learned the hard way what goes wrong with these subarus and i'm going to try and do my best to share my experience and basically 10 points on how you can quickly narrow down a good one from a bad one okay so the absolute first thing if you're considering buying a subaru to look at is going to be the arches they're definitely getting old enough now anything from the hawkeye or older it's definitely old enough that rust is uh starting to be a problem so they typically go on the rear arch first so really it makes sense to go to the rear arch you can push this rubber seal out of the way so just push it out of the way like that i'm sure if the guy is uh wants to sell the car he won't mind you checking and then just get a little light and have a look up there and as you can see there's uh there's no rust so it's nothing really to worry about on this particular car but um on my previous bug eye it was a very very small bubble probably the size of a i don't know a water droplet and in only a few months it has spread to the size of the 50 pence and it just grows really fast once it sort of sets in the rest so that's point number one check the arches for rust now then we come to the second point we basically want to minimize the chances that the car is burning oil there's serious mechanical problems now if the car's burning oil it has to go somewhere it's either going to be on the floor leaking or it's going to be going out the exhaust pipe in the form of smoke so basically we want to start it up now just make sure there's no smoke and do a couple more checks before we actually do start it up so the first thing you want to do before you actually check for smoke open the bonnet and make sure that the engine's cold if it's warm it could be a sign that the owner's trying to hide something they've been running the engine when it's up to temperature it's less likely to make horrible noises and it's less likely to actually burn oil or maybe they've started it up to burn off the oil so that when you come and start it up it's gonna not have any smoke coming out the exhaust now i found this out the hard way the guy said to me on the subaru i had before this um about five years ago the engine was warm i asked him why he was warm he said he'd taken his kids to school an hour later the engine had blown up and i owned the car so i try now not to give the benefit of the doubt too much because that guy seemed very trustworthy but the engine blew up this car i had no concerns it had been standing before i got there and it was cold so we'll start the engine up now then we'll take a look at the back have a look if there's any smoke coming out [Music] so there's no abnormal smoke there's blue that's oil this is just normal smoke where you get on every car sometimes you'll see black smoke or even condensation um that that wouldn't worry me on itself that's just uh fuel it's rich but uh my evo used to have black smoke it's just a sign that the afr's are running rich and on these cars they do tend to run quite rich so black smoke is relatively normal if you run into cat but there's no sign of um any smoke and the engine doesn't make any weird noises so um yeah this car is past step two okay so that's we're on to point three now so we verified the cars not rust into bits and there's nothing dodgy going on with the engine there's no burning oil and it sounds fine the owner's not trying to hide anything from us i'll be going to then step three so what i do is i look at every single panel systematically and i just forced myself to look at the panels reason for that the first ever subaru i bought the guy parked at one angle and i looked at it and it looked absolutely stunning he asked if i wanted to go for the test drive i jumped in the passenger side we went for a test drive i got out looked at the same side of the car and then i bought the car um basically it turned out later on when i got it home the one side had dents all down in they've been beaten out and painted very badly but uh it had like a ripply effect all the way down and i hadn't even noticed it wasn't just one panel it was actually four panels the wing the two doors and the rear quarter all the way down the side so really i should have spotted that but i didn't so now i force myself to not get too excited and look at every panel look at the roof the roof is fine look at the bonnet the bonnet's fine look at the bumper wing door door go all the way around the car and then you just basically gonna force yourself not to miss any massive cosmetic problems which you would have just got so excited and totally missed i think what can happen is when you're buying a new car you get too excited and you end up just missing blatantly obvious things so it's little things like that that can help you to at least you know spot the obvious things yeah that brings us on to point four have a look for signs of spray painting now if the car has been resprayed quite often if they're not very good paint shop which unfortunately my evo i went to a bit of a cowboy paint shop on that not realizing um they'll paint a panel but they won't blend it so you might have a lovely black bonnet but from a certain angle it could be a completely different shade of bonnet for example and i'll really really bug you so just go around the car and have a look if any of the bumpers or the wings they stand out from a mile off like they've been painted but to a low quality uh this car i did spot the bumper as i'd paint and the rear but they have been blended and you would never know really unless you just sat there like i did and inspected every panel but um it's done to a good standard and i'm more than happy with it but that's just something uh worth you know bearing in mind now then number five a knocking sound why do i say a knocking sound well the engine on these cars is a flat four so due to engineering reasons they have to have quite small main bearings so they are prone to having a knock-in bottom end sometimes if the bottom end is starting to go you might get a thousand miles out of it before it actually fails um people in the know if they're dodgy which sadly a lot of subaru sails that i've encountered are quite dodgy then they might be trying to hide a knocking sound so just listen to the engine and see if you can hear the faint rattle rev the car within reason and just see if you can hear like a tapping that goes in and out at certain rpms because that could be the sign that there's play in the bottom end bearings which is pretty much an engine out full rebuild now then point number six check the engine light comes on when the ignition is switched why would i say that well my second subaru when i turn the ignition when you turn the ignition in any car one click you'll probably notice all of the lights come on now the reason they do that is so they're basically doing a bulb check so if you turn the ignition and your low brake fluid light doesn't come on you're supposed to spot that and either replace the bulb or the gauge cluster um so that you know you don't find out that your brakes suddenly fail one day and you never knew because the light wasn't working so that's the theory but what can often happen on subarus or evos or any high performance car is if they've had it mapped or they've decatur they've done something which is not quite right rather than actually fix the problem or get it mapped in they will literally disable or disconnect that engine bulb now that has happened before my silver subaru blew up again they had disconnected the engine light on the dash so when you're driving the car for all i know the engine light's flashing telling you there's a major problem you need to pull over but it wasn't connected so i would never have known okay so here we are in the subaru if i remember correctly if i turn the ignition one click the lights should all come on there we go so the engine light comes on everything oil pressure light battery they all come on and the reason for that is it's doing a bulb check so if i can turn it off disconnect the key it doesn't matter even the airbag light will come on if there is look one every single light comes on and it's doing a bulb check if you do that and the engine light doesn't come on or the low oil pressure light doesn't come on you know someone's been tampering with that cluster and they're trying to hide something from you point number seven um it's not really urgent but it's a very common problem on these subarus check your air conditioning actually works and i did on this car and it worked um i had three subarus this is the only one the aircon's ever worked on um i had tried to get them repressurized as well on my old subarus but there was actually pressure leaks so that's very very common on the new agent pretzels that the aircon does fail uh it has a pressure leak somewhere so uh get out check that it's an easy thing to do especially if you live in a really hot country i'm in the uk so it's pretty much always cold and raining so it's not too much of a problem for us but if you live in the states or you live in florida or something i'm sure that's going to be a big deal so check the aircon number eight check the gearbox feels normal and by normal i mean that make sure there's no grinding when it goes into gears um not only will it possibly grind it for synchros on its way out but check all the gears even there um again on that nightmare silver subaru which i'm referring to once the engine had failed and i rebuilt it the gearbox had actually already was on his way out and i hadn't realized and just a day later it lost second gear so do check all the gears make sure they all feel normal and make sure they all actually work because you can put it into seconds but there's no teeth on the cog then it's not going to give you any drive okay now number nine again this is another point that i found the hard way because both of my previous subarus had this problem and it actually escalated because it hadn't been addressed by previous owners and it actually caused corrosion and damage and that is the rear lights leak in so we'll take a look i'll show you what we were diagnosing okay so here we are at the back of the subaru and quite often the seals in these lights actually fail and if they're not dealt with within a gear um especially in the uk with how much rain we get the water trickles in it wets the boot and the carpet holds onto the moisture and if left long enough it will start to rust i checked this when i bought it and it's all dry in the past i've literally had subarus where that has turned into a wet mush because it's so rotten and again i hadn't spotted it until i had already bought the car um if it does go wrong it's not the end of the world you just got to replace the seal on the tail lights but it's not something that you can ignore and it looks like here they have been siliconed i think um the silicone from factory just to uh catch the water because there used to be a rubber seal down there and the water would trickle down and it was just a matter of time before they failed now on the topic of rubber seals failing this is our 10th and final point for this subaru and that is the window seals on the car they're quite a common problem and they're quite expensive for what they are and i'll show you why the subaru is actually what you will call a pillarless door so um they have a door and then they have a window and then the window actually seals against the chassis here so if these are damaged you're not just gonna get a trickle of water you're gonna get loads and loads of rainwater into the interior of the car and obviously that's going to cause problems so just check that there's no damp inside the car and if it is damp it's probably being caused by these seals now on my last no my first ever subaru they were gone they were actually ripped and they were quite obviously damaged um on this one they're all in really good nick obviously the guy who i bought it off he's uh really looked after this car so um yeah it passed all my 10 steps now if you can't just fail some of those steps i wouldn't be overly concerned obviously if the engine's knocking that's going to be a big concern for most people but say you had a couple of damaged window seals or the lights are leaking or is this one of the bumpers has got lack appeal on its own it's not the end of the world but if it's if it's failing every single test systematically then you know you're going to be buying yourself a headache basically now i've learned those 10 steps the hard way twice i've made big mistakes buying subarus but on this one i'm glad to see it passed all those tests when i was looking at it and uh it's been faultless since buying it so where they obviously do work now don't make the same mistakes i did bring a friend bring a couple of friends if you can if you go on your own you're going to be overwhelmed too much information and you're just pretty much going to miss most of the important things sometimes having a friend there is not as invested they're not as in loving with the car as you are it's a big help they just look at it as it is they go look you know that's that's scratched that's got a bit of rust on it that's that and sometimes the clear perspective as well can actually benefit you and you end up buying a better car at the end of it so that's my advice hopefully you enjoyed the video if you did or you find it helpful be sure to click like and consider subscribing cheers guys

Channel: Lewis Cleaning Services

Views: 89,273

Keywords:

Id: Ac9B-_itGUQ

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 06 2021