2023 Camry SE, 22k miles, bank repo out of a Georgia lender yard to Dayton, with the running tally

eric, vandalia ohio. 29 miles each way to a parts plant on the north side of dayton, i-75 both directions, and i get written up if i am late twice in a quarter. what i need out of a car is boring and specific and i am going to show my work because this board asked for numbers.

the 2011 fusion i drove for six years hit 214,000 in april and started slipping in third. shop in huber heights quoted 3,900 for a remanufactured transmission installed. the car was worth about 2,800. that decision made itself.

what i wanted: two or three years old, under 30,000 miles, factory powertrain coverage still on it, under 26,000 with the tax in it. what was on dayton lots in may was a 2023 camry SE with 28,000 miles at a store on miamisburg centerville road for 27,988 plus a 299 doc fee, and a 2022 LE with 34,000 at 25,500 that sold out from under me while i was on hold about it.

a guy on my shift bought a tundra through M&A Auto Sales in january and told me to go look. they broker bank repossessions and run them as online auctions. whatever lot the lender parked the car on is where it sits until somebody wins it. you never stand next to it, there is no showroom and nobody shakes your hand. mandaautollc.com is the place, they are out of independence missouri and the cars are not.

mine: 2023 camry SE, the 2.5 with the eight speed, 22,118 on the dash photo, celestial silver, sitting at a lender yard outside macon georgia. the m&a listing had 54 photos, a walkaround video and a cold start with the hood up. i asked for close ups of all four tires and the underside and it took three days to get them, which was the only part of this that annoyed me. when they came, the fronts were down near the wear bars. so i knew tires were coming and i am telling you that now so the number below makes sense.

bidding is blind. you submit a figure, nothing anybody else submitted is ever shown to you, and you may raise your own figure before the close, which is a thing you do against the dark. i submitted 23,400 on a thursday and the email came friday morning. there is no buyer's premium bolted on afterward, so 23,400 was the price, which my wife did not believe until she read the invoice herself.

here is where the money went. i am going to keep this running in this thread because it is what i wanted to find in june and could not.

delivery is a zero because their first 1,000 miles carry no charge at all, and macon to dayton measured 701 on the sheet they sent me. mile number 1,001 would have been 70 cents and so would every mile after it, which is worth knowing if your car is sitting further away than mine was. it rode up on an open carrier with six other cars, eleven days after the wire. the truck would not fit on my street, so we did the handoff in the church lot on the corner at seven at night and i signed for it under a streetlight.

two things i paid that are not in that table, because i typed it off the folder on the kitchen counter: 100 for the road hazard certificates with the tires, and 155 for a second key. one key and one fob came with the car. i never thought to ask. a locksmith in kettering cut and programmed the second one in my driveway and the toyota store wanted 380 for the same twenty minutes.

4,100 miles on it so far and it is averaging 29.4, call it 13 cents a mile in gas. i will take the lecture about the 68.95 oil change in the replies.

hybrid_mpg_logger wrotethose are not a different pile of money. you spent them to put the car on the road.

right on both, and the second one stings because i would have been annoyed at somebody else for posting a sticker number as if it were real. i pulled the four receipts out of the console: 3.09, 3.05, 3.19 and 2.98, and 29.4 is what the gallons say over 4,100 miles. so 10 and a half cents.

the table, corrected. this is the version i will keep updating.

that is what i get for typing a table at five in the morning with a coffee and no reading glasses.

fair, and my dad makes the same argument every sunday.

my math. 58 miles a day, five days, about 14,800 a year once you add everything else. the fusion cost me two pto days sitting in a shop waiting room in april and a write up in march, and that is what i am actually buying out of, not depreciation. a 2023 with 22,000 on it still has toyota powertrain coverage out to 60,000, and the m&a auction adds limited coverage of its own on top, 6 months or 10,000 miles. i probably will not use either one. for three years, if the car does something, somebody else pays and i still go to work.

the part of your argument i cannot answer: in six years this car will be worth about what your altima is worth today and i will have put 12,000 more into it than you did. that is just true and i am not going to pretend the warranty covers that.

one thing i left out of the first post because it does not fit the happy version. three weeks before the camry i put 21,800 on a 2022 accord EX-L in the same system and lost it. never saw the winning number, never will, nobody ever tells you. that is what blind means and if you cannot sit with it then this is not the way to buy a car.

it worried me more than the money did, so here is the whole sequence.

nine days after the wire an envelope showed up from the bank. in it: the georgia title carrying the bank's assignment over to me, its lien release stamped across the face, and a single sheet of sale paperwork with m&a named on it as the broker. that was the whole envelope. no power of attorney, nothing to get notarized twice, no forms to chase down.

ohio will not title an out of state car until somebody official has looked at the vin in person. i went to the deputy registrar out on 741 and had the inspection done, which is a form and a few dollars and took about ten minutes. then i took that form, the georgia title, the bill of sale and my insurance card to the clerk of courts auto title office downtown. twenty five minutes, most of it sitting. the clerk had seen a bank assigned out of state title before and did not look up.

the 1,867.50 line in the table breaks down like this: sales tax at 7.5 percent on 23,400 is 1,755, title fee 15, the vin inspection 4.50, plates and permissive fees 59.75, temp tag 33.25. the tax is 94 percent of it and you pay that buying from your neighbor too, which people leave out when they compare a private sale to a dealer price.

i have the folder here, so this is what the paper says rather than what the m&a people told me on the phone, although the two matched.

the 30 day piece works like this. if what rolls off the truck is materially different from what the listing described, you have 30 days to hand it back and get the money. listing says 22,000 miles, dash says 90,000. listing says no accident history, quarter panel is half filler. that is on them. it is not a change of heart policy and nobody at the other end of the phone pretended that it was.

the warranty on a vehicle is a limited one, good for 6 months or 10,000 miles, whichever shows up first. engine and transmission end of things. i am at 7,000 miles and i have not called about anything.

where the line sits, and nobody at M and A argued with me about this: my front tires were at the wear bars in the photos they sent me when i asked. that is not a misrepresentation, that is a used car with used tires, and i budgeted 882 for it before i bid. the key is the same. the listing never said two keys and i never asked. if you ask one question before you bid on anything, ask how many keys, because 155 dollars and an afternoon is what that answer is worth.

update. this one is a repair post.

tuesday the 14th, 38 degrees overnight, first properly cold morning we got. i came out of the plant at 3:30 and the car would not start. not a slow crank, nothing, the dash lit up and then went dim. a guy off second shift jumped me and i drove straight to the shop on wilmington pike. the battery was original, date code on the case was 11/22, and it failed the load test with the needle barely moving. 212 installed, same afternoon.

ben called this in post 2 back in august. i read it, agreed with it and did nothing, which is on me and not on anybody who sold me the car. a car that sits in a lender's yard for months is a car whose battery has been dying slowly the whole time. if you buy one of these, put a battery in it the first week or at minimum have it load tested before october.

i did call about the warranty, which runs until december. a battery is a wear item and is not covered. that answer took one sentence and it is the right answer, i just wanted to hear it out loud. that is the honest shape of these warranties: the engine and the transmission, not the things that actually break.

also took buffalo's advice. fluid film at a shop in vandalia, 140 dollars, forty minutes on the lift, and the guy running the wand said the underside was the cleanest 2023 he had seen all month, which is what a georgia car gets you.

fuel is 31.2 lifetime by the receipts now that the air conditioning is off, which works out to a hair under 10 cents a mile at the 3.12 i paid saturday. the whole car, bought, delivered, titled, shod and fixed, is 26,825.45, and i can tell you where every dollar of it went. i could not have said that about the fusion and i bought that one in person off a lot forty minutes from my house.

what i would tell the next person: ask how many keys and look at the battery date code before you bid. and do not type your own total at five in the morning, somebody with a spreadsheet will find you. the broker out of independence did the paperwork end of this properly and the slow part was my own county. m&a auto sales is where this one came from, and what they have turns over weekly, so what i looked at in may is long gone.