Best way to buy a car in Taiwan?

How do Taiwanese people buy second hand cars in Taiwan?

Having already been to a couple of used car dealers here in Taichung, I’m finding I’d like to avoid the whole universe of crooked-ness that they seem to offer along with their cars that have undoubtedly been in accidents, had their odometers rolled back and are filled with bondo.

I also can’t believe that people use Yahoo Auction to secure second hand cars.

Is there some other outlet that people use?

Some other Taiwanese version of Craig’s List or something similar?

Any advice would be swell.

We bought our first car from another foreigner who was leaving and we got a great deal on it. (It also meant that he wasn’t getting rid of it because of any mechanical issues or because he didn’t like it.) It was a great little car, but last month, it saw its last days.

We got our most recent car through our very trustworthy mechanic. (I used to think this was an oxymoron, but it’s not.)

A friend used Yahoo auctions, and asked his mechanic to look at the car before buying it. Having nothing to hide, the seller consented. He’s been very pleased with his purchase.

A lot of times, you can see cars with “For Sale” signs in the windows around town.

One of the Chinese newspapers has a weekend edition with a whole section of used car listings (many by owner). I wish I knew which one; maybe someone else can help you out with that!

Check out these site, mainly used by dealers:
http://used.carnews.com/
http://ocar.com.tw/

Depending on the request we do help people find legitimate cars of legitimate quality without the hassle of dealing with salesmen and the BS.
Taichung though is notorious for those dodgy salesmen and very dodgy cars. There is a high percentage indeed of flood damaged, crash damaged, generally dodgy cars in Taichung and also their online information which tends to be untrue once you have arrived at the car in question.
What we try to do is cut the you know what out and line up a vehicle within the customer’s requirements and budget as well as provide an inspection report for it. The reason we don’t advertise this specific function of our business to the local market is the trust element. Most people won’t readily trust a company which claims to find quality cars at the right price as they are car sales related. We aren’t, we are an inspection company. It is in our interest to find good car for people so that we can improve our reputation which is the only thing we continue our business based upon. We only tell foreigners about the finding facility as I like to think I can help from time to time and with the translation etc.

Of course we primarily perform vehicle inspections though which actually do make us more money. We don’t really profit anywhere near as much in vehicle sourcing as we do vehicle checking as vehicle sourcing only pays if the customer likes the vehicle and we spend lots of time sourcing and taking pictures, whereas vehicle checking is done to any car a customer requires to be inspected, thus eliminating our responsibility when it comes to a vehicle being potentially a bad choice. A poor vehicle find by a customer just means that it is likely we will perform the next inspection on the next vehicle found.
Good salesmen actually like us as we can help distinguish their good cars from the other crap cars found in other garages and so improve their business. Bad dealers usually offer us red envelopes on the spot to say their cars are O.K. when indeed they aren’t :unamused: .
Still it makes my life easier. At least I always know from the red envelope offering on the get go that I am likely to find something seriously wrong on a vehicle before I have even started. :smiley:

Oh, and of course we don’t take payments to tell our customers lies in case you were wondering.

Edit: I apologize if I rambled. I’m on the wine this Sunday night. :wink: