HOUSTON — These days, used vehicles are harder to find and more expensive, but there’s something else you should be aware of if you’re shopping for a used car in Houston.
Houston leads the nation in the number of waterlogged cars back on the road. CARFAX crunches numbers of reported flood-damaged vehicles and Houston had nearly 34,000 in 2021. That puts us as the leading city in the country. A distant second is Miami with a little more than 17,000. Some are branded as flood-damaged, but not all of them.
“The issues come if you are buying a vehicle and you don’t know that it has a waterlogged past because there can be major issues down the line,” said Emilie Voss, with CARFAX.
Ateeque Chowdhry lives in Spring and just started shopping for a used SUV. He had no idea that Houston leads the nation in waterlogged cars.
“I didn’t realize that,” he said. “Wow.”
Chowdhry knows it’s already a tough market with a shortage of used inventory and inflated prices. It never dawned on him to look out for con artists trying to sell water-damaged ones.
“I’m not exactly sure what I would do,” he said. “Let’s just hope it doesn’t happen.”
But it did almost happen to two online car shoppers in a week. They sent vehicles to Auto Exam in Webster to get inspected.
“What does that say to you that you got two in a week,” KHOU 11 Consumer Reporter Tiffany Craig asked a mechanic.
“It tells me that right now the supply ... is limited. People are just selling whatever they can get their hands on,” Scott Matejka, with Auto Exam, said.
Matejka offered a few tips for anyone shopping for a used car. They can check these things even before taking the vehicle to a mechanic for inspection.
- Do the smell test. If you smell a musty or masked with heavy air freshener, that’s a red flag.
- Pull back the trim at the doors and get under the carpet. Check to make sure nothing is wet and that the jute is not brittle.
- Check the seat tracks, around the steering wheel and under the dash for rust.
- Look at the lowest part of the trunk where the spare tire lives. That’s a low part of the car and standing water could be there or a debris line.
CARFAX estimates that more than 200,000 vehicles flooded during Hurricane Ida last year. Some of those vehicles are expected to be cleaned up and could wash up to a car lot near you.
“I think it’s very reasonable to expect with this highly strained used car market right now that a chunk of those will end up back in the used car market,” Voss said.
Houston is expected to top the list of most flooded cars again in 2022. It’s nothing to brag about but helpful to know if you’re in the market for a used vehicle.