CAT S - Should I Avoid???

[buzyg]

I do have to laugh at the people on here who wouldn't buy a CAT D or CAT S - how many people know the total history of any car they have bought?
How many cars have been in accidents and been repaired by the insurance companies but not written-off? So if your £20k Z4 had been in an accident and then repaired by the insurance company costing £10k to repair it, it wouldn't show up on any report that you can buy on the internet!!! How many of the self-righteous people on here can say that their Z4 hasn't had big repair work done that they don't know about?

As Mikey says much of it is about resale. I had two unfortunate idiots write off two of my cars within a year.

The first a Mazda 2 Capalla 1.6 was worth about £1300 quid and had a small dent in the rear hatch after a bloke ran into the back of it, in the rain, while I was stopped at a red light. I got £1100 off the insurance had it MoT'd and carried on driving it.

The second was my beloved ///MR. A young lady pulled out 20ft in front of me at night on an industrial estate. I didn't even get my foot as far as the brake pedal before we collided. Front right wheel pushed back into the arch bumper radiator done in steering rack damaged, air bag deployed, tiny nick in the end of the bonnet above the untouched headlight. The insurance wrote the car off and again I could have taken most of the value and had it repaired myself. But it was never going to be the same car to me. how ever well it was repaired and would have been worth less for many years, though I suspect one day, like most classics, people would ignore the repair history. As you say cars that stick around long enough almost all have repair work hiding under the shiny paint work. But that takes many years and in the meantime they are harder to sell on.

So From my perspective. Fine on a cheap runabout. But not fine on a P & J.

 

[Silverstar]

I do have to laugh at the people on here who wouldn't buy a CAT D or CAT S - how many people know the total history of any car they have bought?
How many cars have been in accidents and been repaired by the insurance companies but not written-off? So if your £20k Z4 had been in an accident and then repaired by the insurance company costing £10k to repair it, it wouldn't show up on any report that you can buy on the internet!!! How many of the self-righteous people on here can say that their Z4 hasn't had big repair work done that they don't know about?

I wouldn’t touch a CAT S or N for the simple reason a) unless the car comes with documented evidence of what damage the car sustained and evidence of it being repaired properly you just don’t know what you are buying and b) problems sometimes with Insurance and resale.

On the other hand I wouldn’t mind buying a salvage car with the aim of fixing it up provided either I could do the work myself or have a trusted garage do the work so I know the car is repaired correctly, but it would have to be extremely cheap considering the hassle with resale.