Buying a car
in Pullman.

A vehicle left parked through a summer, a semester abroad, or an internship elsewhere develops problems that a low odometer reading completely hides. Brake rotors surface-rust and may or may not clean up; calipers and parking brake mechanisms seize. Tires flat-spot and take a set. Fuel degrades. A battery left to self-discharge for months is often permanently damaged even though it will still start the car on the day you look at it. We test the battery under load rather than trusting that it cranked.

This is farm country and it is a genuine, common, expensive problem here rather than a rare one. A car parked for weeks — especially outdoors or in a shed or barn — gets rodents in it, and they chew wiring insulation and nest in the cabin air box. The resulting electrical faults are intermittent, maddening, and costly to trace. We look in the places they get into, because finding it before you buy is worth a great deal more than finding it in February.

Cars here live outside, and they spend several months a year on roads treated with sand and de-icer. Underbody corrosion, brake and fuel line condition, and the state of suspension and subframe hardware all matter more on a car that has wintered on the Palouse than on the same model that came from a mild climate. If the car was driven here from out of state a year ago, its first Palouse winter has already happened to it.

Student cars change hands often and paperwork does not always travel with them. That is exactly where reading the car's own stored service data earns its keep — BMW Condition Based Service, Mercedes ASSYST, Volkswagen and Audi cluster records — because it tells us what the vehicle itself believes was done and when, independently of whatever folder came with it.