Everyone Should ALWAYS Do This Before Buying A Used Vehicle!

All right guys, today I'm going to show you something that you should be doing on a used car before you buy it. It's going to save you a ton of money. Let's get into it. So first thing, this is if you cannot get the vehicle to a technician or shop somewhere to look it over. You know, maybe you're going out somewhere to buy this car. You're buying it from a person, maybe. It's a car a lot. That's not going to let you take it off a lot, which I will tell you right now, if they're not going to let you take it off a lot to have it inspected, then I might want to walk away from that. But I get it. Sometimes you got to do what you got to do. If you can get it to a tech, to a mechanic, to a shop, do that because they should do this. But if you can't, then I want you to do this. So one of the things that a lot of people have had happen to them is they'll go in, they'll test drive a car. You know, you're not test driving this thing usually very long. You're taking on a little road trip, a little road, not a road trip, but a little drive around the block or whatever, a few miles. And, you know, oh, you found out it rides good. You know, you're comfortable with it. You like it. So you buy the car, you go back in, you do whatever you got to do. You buy the car, you drive off. Next day, check engine light comes on or next week, the check engine light comes on, you know, and you're like, man, what the heck, you know? So what I'm not saying this happens a lot. I'm not saying that, you know, a ton of companies are doing this, but it can happen where, you know, you've got a check engine light that's on and, you know, they clear the code, they turn the light off. And how are you going to know they cleared the code? Even if you took a, some type of a code reader and you plug it in and check for codes, it's going to say no codes, right? So this is a way to look to see how the code's been cleared. So if you're doing a Ford, an older Ford, you know, if you saw a P1000 code, then you know, the codes have been cleared, but that's the only car that I know of, the only company that I know of that used to do that. So, but there's a way of seeing if the codes have been cleared. So what I've done here is I've connected up a, the gear wrench little dongle here, right? So, and the reason I'm using this is it's really, really quick and easy, connects to your phone. Let me jump on here. So I'm just going to go into this vehicle. So this car is a good car. I'm going to show you what it looks like, but keep watching because I'm going to show you a bad car, one that has a check engine light on, that I want to show you what it looks like if somebody clears it. Now, this is a vehicle that has no problems and the codes have not been cleared. All right. So there, there, and then I'm just going to go to system selection and engine, and then we're going to go into, so if we go into read DTC, we're going to see that there's, there's no DTC. So that was, that's what you would see if they cleared the code. We're going to go into live data. All right. What are we looking for in here? We're looking for monitors. So let's go ahead and punch in monitor. And it's just going to narrow it down because a lot of cars will have a whole lot of, of data. There'll be a ton of data pits and you'll be scrolling forever. So we just want to punch in monitor and it's going to take us. So, and there's going to be several monitors. So we see the misfire monitor. We see over here on the side where it says available, right? We're not looking for that. What we're looking for is complete or incomplete. So there's a complete, right? So the EGR gas, that's complete. Oxygen sensor heater, complete. O2 sensor monitor or oxygen sensor monitor, complete. All right. Just keep going down. The ones that you really want to look at are catalyst. So these are the ones that people clear the codes on all the time is this catalyst monitor. That's your catalytic converter and your EVAP evaporative emissions. Those two take longer than the rest of them to run. So if the codes were cleared recently, right, then those probably have not run. If they are run, everything's complete and you have no codes. I mean, that's not a, it's not a guarantee that there's not some issue with the car, but it's a guarantee that they did not just clear the codes on the car before you got there. So you can go drive it and not have a check engine light on. The check engine light will not come on. There are, there are a few things that will cause that light to come on right away. If something fails, it'll cause it to come on right away. But those things are, there are not a ton of those. Manufacturers really don't want the check engine light to come on. The check engine light for them is a warranty light. They don't really like that thing to come on. So they're going to do everything they can. I mean, sometimes they even cheat, right? I mean, you know, and don't want it to come on. They do things that they shouldn't do. So you have to understand that just because the check engine light isn't on now, doesn't mean that somebody didn't clear the codes. If they clear the codes and you start the car up and you go drive it, it doesn't mean that that light's going to reset immediately. It might take a week, two weeks, who knows? It might take quite a while for that light to reset. This is a broken car. So this is an 08 Sienna. It's got an active problem right now. Check engine light is on right now. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into the data. I'm going to show you the code, right? And then I'm going to clear the code and show you what it would look like if you went somewhere and they've cleared the code out, right? And I'm going to start the car up once we've cleared it. And I'm going to show you that the light does not come right back on. So let's go ahead and look at the data. So we're just going to jump into, I've already got the vehicle in here. We're going to go to system selection. And again, you're going into engine. Don't worry about the ECT. If you see engine, that's what you want to go into. All right. We're going to go into that and then let's read the code. So here we have a couple of circuit problems, which would normally come back on pretty quickly, but let's just not, let's just look at that. You got two codes in here. All right. Now I'm going to shut the car off, turn the key back on. I'm going to clear the code. All right. Code is cleared. Let's read the code. No code found. I'm going to start the car up. Let's come on in. Let's take a look. No check engine light, right? If I go to read DTC, we have no code, right? So this car is running now with no code. Let's go ahead and let's take a look at the data. This is where you want to go. This is the part that's going to save you a ton of money. So you see right now, we've got all the monitors at the top on this one. So, and I might still have monitor in the search bar. So that's what might be why. Look at the catalyst monitor right there. Incomplete, right? So you see that, you know, that this car has had the codes cleared pretty recently. We see the heated catalyst monitor. It's completed itself because that happened pretty quickly, right? But we also see the EVAP monitor, see the evaporative emissions EVAP monitor is incomplete. I mean, that just takes a matter of less than two minutes to hook up to the car and just check it. And it's just really a quick, easy, you know, protects you from buying a car and going down. And here's the ones. So here's the big ones, guys. I mean, this is what happens. It's going to be a cat code of some type more than likely. It's a very expensive fix on most cars. And what's going to happen is if somebody is going to do this, they're usually going to do it on that code. It's a PO420 or a PO430 code. That's a catalyst efficiency code. They might've put an O2 sensor in it. They might tell you, Oh, it's got a brand new O2 sensor in it. You know, I mean, that's a sign, right? And if you see that's incomplete, it's because they're trying to fix this, this cat efficiency code and are trying to hide it one of the other. That code could take a week. It could take a month for that code to that monitor to run you have to drive it at a very specific set of parameters have to be met. It's called a drive cycle. You have to meet all these parameters for it to test that catalytic converter. And that might take quite a while for that to happen. So that's why that's a good one to look at. The other one is the evaporative emissions, because it has to, again, a very, you know, all of them have to have a set of parameters have to be met, but those two, the catalytic converter and the EVAP, they're harder to meet all the requirements for them to test them. And again, the EVAP emissions, you know, the evaporative, that's the one, if you leave your gas cap loose that it could be, you know, if a, if it has that code in there, they say, Oh, it's just the gas cap. Well, you know, don't think you're just going to throw a gas cap on it and fix it. If you could throw a gas cap on it and fix it, they would have done it. Right. So again, it could be something costly, but the big one is a catalytic converter, because that could be, that could be thousands of dollars. And unfortunately we have had people that have come in, Hey, I bought this car a week ago or a month ago. It was as is they bring it in. It needs a catalytic converter. It's 2,500 bucks. And it's like, man, I mean, it's just, it's just, it's hard to tell somebody that the EPA says that certain parts of the vehicle have to be tested either right all the time or some of the time. And these monitors are tests that run that once they run the computer knows, okay, I've run those tests and it's, and that monitor is complete. I can now go and, and run the tests on the components, right? So when you have, if you live in a state that has emissions, we used to do, we don't have emissions here testing, but what they used to do in a lot of places is they would put a probe in your tailpipe and they would run the engine and you know, they would see if you pass or not today, most places, what they're doing is they're hooking up something just like this. And they're going to see if the monitors are all run. If the monitors are all run and the code, there's no codes in the system. There's no check engine light on, then you're going to pass emissions, right? The reason that these monitors are kind of here and they show them complete because the same thing that people do when they try to get over on, they're selling you a car with a check engine light on, but they don't know the check engine light was on or a problem with the car. The same thing happens when people go to try to pass emissions, they got to check engine light on. They know they're not going to pass emissions with the check engine light on. So what they do is they go and they clear the code and they try to take it in to have the emissions test done. Well, it's going to fail immediately because they're going to look at it and go, well, the monitors aren't run. So we know that somebody threw the code on it, right? So they know there's a problem with the vehicle. So the monitors are this series of tests that gets run. And once it runs a series of tests and it knows it can start monitoring the component that it's there to test, catalytic converter, oxygen sensors, misfires, there's different systems, right? And like I said, not every single system is tested all the time. The evaporative emissions, the one for your gas cap. Well, if you've got a full tank of gas, it can't test it, right? It's just too full. It's got to be usually between a quarter and three quarter. Every car manufacturer is different. These are all, we're getting kind of down in the weeds on this stuff. The biggest thing for you to know when you go to buy a vehicle is you want all the monitors to run and you want no codes in the system. And if you have that, then you probably got, it's probably okay.