Carfax is wrong?

[vipernate]

Hello all, we have a client who would like to sell us his Viper. We ran a Carfax on the car and it shows a accident. We asked him about it before and then ran the report and asked him again and he insists that the Viper has never been in a accident and that he wants to dispute the Carfax report. Anybody know if Carfax can be wrong? How can a VIN show a accident if it never happened? He has put in writing that the car has never been in a accident, how can one go about "proving" to Carfax that the car has never been wrecked?

Thanks in advance

 

[Jay Herbert]

Car fax gets it's accident info from police reports. The carfax should show the police department the report came from. Get a copy of the report to see the VIN on it. If it is the same.... odds are it was in an accident although it is possible the VIN on the accident report was mistyped. If the accident was during the ownership time frame of the person offing the car, it should be obvoius correct or incorrect...

If the accident was in a state the car never lived, or the owner of record was not one that ever owned ths particular Viper, you can try get car fax to correct the report, but good luck as they do not have a real "service mentality".

The Car Fax for my car shows a damaged title (for a period of time), it one of those sort of correct things.... the State DMV made an error that has since been corrected, and the title is now clear as it always should have been.... but the car fax shows the states screw up (the damaged title for the previous owner), and now a clear title.

In the future I'm sure someone will say the title was washed, but that is not the case since this was all done in the same state, it should be clear to a buyer that the title was not washed.... most titles are washed "between" states. I have the verification paperwork, and in the end, the paperwork is what counts.

 

[vipernate]

Thanks Jay! We are going to call the state's police department Monday to verify (the Carfax shows the case #) and then hopefully get the Carfax cleared up. He has owned the car since day 1 and insists that it was never in a accident. Thanks again for the info.

 

[SERPENT INDIANA]

.......About a year ago I ran CARFAX on a bunch of cars I had owned thru the years....there were errors on about a third of them....some didn't show accidents the cars were in....some didn't show proper title info...in short, I was amazed at how many errors there were in these cars...I knew the real story because the cars had been mine....I was mainly just trying to see where the cars were after many years, out of curiousity.....I wouldn't depend on CARFAX as the final word on any purchase.....