The Hurricanes Are Gone, but the Cars May Remain
The New York Times
April 1, 2007
Motoring
By Marcia Biederman
Earl Grubbs of Cranberry Township, Pa., hadn’t even arrived home from the dealership with his new car before the air bag warning light came on. It was last October, and he had just bought a used 2005 Buick LaCrosse CSX with only 45 miles on the odometer for $20,000.
Mr. Grubbs, a retired Army lieutenant colonel, thought he had gotten a great deal on a car that cost about $30,000 new. It was a certified General Motors used car, and a Carfax vehicle history report showed that the Buick had never been damaged.
But like the telltale heart of the Edgar Allan Poe story, the air bag light linked the car to its troubled past. Mr. Grubbs had bought the car far from, and about a year after, the hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast. Still, when he took the car to be repaired at a Buick dealership near his suburban Pittsburgh home, he said the service staff traced the car to a Buick dealer in Florida, where the staff told him several vehicles had been damaged by Hurricane Wilma. Mr. Grubbs’s car had been one of them.
According to an e-mail message from G.M. that Mr. Grubbs received after he complained to the company, his Buick had been damaged by flying debris during the storm, and body work had been done on the front fenders, the front doors, the hood, the roof panel and the trunk. Also, the windshield had been replaced.
“I negotiated on a vehicle without knowing what had happened to it,” Mr. Grubbs said.
George Bowling, owner of Waynesburg Carriage, where Mr. Grubbs bought the car, said in an interview that his dealership had bought the Buick at a G.M.-sponsored auction and was not told it had been damaged….
Rosemary Shahan, president of Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety in Sacramento, said consumers could have bought hurricane-damaged cars without knowing it in what she called salvage fraud, where cars that insurers have declared total losses are repaired and resold without the seller disclosing the damage….
And sometimes the cars keep circulating at the consumer level. Mr. Grubbs got a refund in February from Waynesburg Carriage. G.M. also paid his legal fees. But after the Buick was returned to the dealer, it was put on the market again. A salesman at Waynesburg said Thursday that the car was sold more than a week ago, with full disclosure about the hurricane damage.
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