It's likely that I'll pull the trigger soon on an out of town PPI. I've read (and enjoyed) the wiki and threads about buyer's advice like inspection checklists, buying from a Primer, preferring cars with maintenance histories, seeking an NSX cert'd tech and collision expert for PPI's, checking carfaxes, asking local Primers for a drive-by or PPI tech recommendations, compression/leakdown or not, etc. But where things get interesting is searching thread titles for "pre purchase inspection" and reading about all the things on the fringe like inexperienced PPI sources (bad), things intentionally witheld by unscrupulous sellers (worse), or later finding things not discovered during an otherwise solid PPI simply because you can't see thru steel or predict the future (dumb luck). In fact very ironically I realized today that an NSX just listed in Autotrader was owned for only 3 months and is the same one I passed on in November since the car and the seller seemed kind of sketchy; it needed thousands of $ of service after purchase around December, possibly due to a bad PPI or no PPI. I'll later update my other thread on this car out of fairness to future Prime shoppers once I verify a few things so as to not unfairly penalize the current seller if the car is now solid.
So I'd like to hear if anyone has any good fringe stories from their PPI's that are above and beyond all the good typical buyers advice and which will actually be good lessons learned to pass on. Did you provide a checklist or let the dealership use theirs? Some Acura dealer PPI's sound like a general checklist for screening CPO's, and I've heard too often of CPO cars that were probably only given a visual once-over, oil change, and detailing... Although they're interesting to hear about, I'm not looking for any "I passed on a PPI and got a bulletproof gem for $22k" stories, as awesome as those are.
Thanks!
PS - am I crazy or was there once a 4 or 5 page pdf "buyers guide" from a Honda-fan magazine that's no longer available on the Wiki? I'm thinking it was this and that someone re-typed it possibly to avoid some copyright issue? Does anyone recognize this as being a retype of an article?
http://www.nsxprime.com/wiki/Image:Honda_Tuning_Checklist-Final.pdf
So I'd like to hear if anyone has any good fringe stories from their PPI's that are above and beyond all the good typical buyers advice and which will actually be good lessons learned to pass on. Did you provide a checklist or let the dealership use theirs? Some Acura dealer PPI's sound like a general checklist for screening CPO's, and I've heard too often of CPO cars that were probably only given a visual once-over, oil change, and detailing... Although they're interesting to hear about, I'm not looking for any "I passed on a PPI and got a bulletproof gem for $22k" stories, as awesome as those are.
Thanks!
PS - am I crazy or was there once a 4 or 5 page pdf "buyers guide" from a Honda-fan magazine that's no longer available on the Wiki? I'm thinking it was this and that someone re-typed it possibly to avoid some copyright issue? Does anyone recognize this as being a retype of an article?
http://www.nsxprime.com/wiki/Image:Honda_Tuning_Checklist-Final.pdf
