Hammer Time: Learning From Failure

Every car at an auto auction is a failure. Well, maybe not the 4Runner that Bertel and Ed saw with me that had 459,000 miles (it sold for $1800 by the way). But there always comes a time or a point where an owner will say, “Enough!” and proceed to accept a wholesale price for a retail vehicle.

There are many reasons for failure… and here are some of the most common ones I find at the auctions…

Demographic Failure: Once upon a time the United States sold over a million minivans every single year. They were the quintessential American vehicle for nearly two decades. Space. Comfort. Wonderful real world hauling capability. The baby boomers quickly found that minivans could take care of 90+% of their needs in modern day suburbia.

But then the kids moved off to college… and mom and dad found something else. Anything BUT a minivan in most cases. In the meantime the auctions became absolutely loaded with these models.

So if you are looking for a cheap hauler these days you can forget pickups or SUV’s. Even tree hauling companies are now using minivans thanks to the aging baby boomers and the former big three dumping their unloved models to the rental fleets for years on end.

Mechanical Failure: Sometimes automakers create utter crap… and then hide behind an army of lawyers once the warranty expires. Is it a fair thing? Well, one thing I can tell you is that these vehicles will spend years on end at the auctions seeking another idealist who is willing to machine 32 valves or rebuild a CVT.

The rebuilding process for the nastiest stuff rarely works. However I have seen a lot of vehicles get the automotive equivalent of a sex change. The Jaguar that gets a 350 V8 under the hood. A Saturn Vue whose automatic gets replaced with a manual. The Dodge Intrepid with the 2.7 Liter that gets recycled into Chinese beer cans. You get the idea.

Overproduction Failure: It could have been GM’s need to make surplus Metros and Cobalts to satisfy CAFE requirements. Honda may have found irrational exuberance when it came to producing the Insight and CR-Z, not to mention Chrysler’s maniacal stocking of Crossfires, Stratuses or Sebrings during the mid-2000’s.

Sometimes it’s not even a channel stuffing game… but a finance game. Mitsubishi’s decision to offer 0 down and 0 payments until the next year for every crack whore that found one of their dealerships was a legendary example of this.

I won’t name any names (except for the Aveo, Sentra, and Caliber) but some automakers still find themselves pressing the production circuit a few too many times for reasons other than popularity. Those models wind up selling for lower prices at the auctions.

There are dozens of ‘failures’ out there at the auctions. Substandard repairs. Electrical issues. A bad owner. A car that simply got lost in the shuffle due to a lack of market awareness.

But before I go to my fifth auction this week, I have to ask you, the Best & Brightest a quick question. At what point did you consider your once prized ride a ‘failure’? The last failure I had was a daily driver that I simply didn’t have time to drive anymore. It was a Camry… a boring two door refrigerator… and now someone is still driving it with over 300k miles. Minus a 200,000 mile rollback. No doubt courtesy of the ‘exporter’ who bought that 4Runner.