Has anyone here bought a vehicle that has a rebuilt / renewed title? I'm looking for a truck for my son. He wants a Toyota Tacoma. Traditionally they're very expensive for the year and the miles that are on them. You will find some lower priced Tacomas that look great but they have rebuilt titles. They are bought at auction and rebuilt to sell. Is it too risky?

I have bought a couple of rebuilt titles. They're actually becoming more popular as vehicles are getting more and more pricey.

Is it too risky? Well yes and no. Depends on your threshold of risk. I bought a 2015 corvette with a flood title. Almost everyone thought I was insane but I did my homework and the price was right. The person who rebuilt it (new carpet, new computer, rebuilt the engine etc put about 15k miles on it over 4 years after the rebuild. I also inspected it before the purchase. I figured at worse I had roughly $12k to put into it if something is wrong before it would have been worth buying without rebuilt title.

There's a company in Fort Worth that rebuilds trucks and they have a great reputation. They use oem parts and make sure everything is aligned and within spec before selling. They also charge more but it's still way cheaper than retail.

I would A. Check the carfax and then google the vin. Most of the time google will have a cache of auction pictures you can look at. You can see the damage before it was rebuilt. One truck I was looking at had a description of "small fender bender that insurance didn't want to cover". After I googled the vin the entire front in was caved in. I obviously passed.

Make sure your insurance will insure it. Geico had no issue with mine. I also paid cash so I didn't have to worry about financing it but some banks won't finance.

Get a PPI done if you don't want to inspect it yourself. Have them look at welds, alignment etc. then take it on a 30 minute test drive. Make the engine heat all the way up.

Lastly is resale value. This scares most people off from rebuilt titles but it's like anything else you want to sell in life. If you price it right it will sell. Yes it is well below retail but it was also well below retail when you bought it.

For your kid?
NO WAY would I consider a rebuilt vehicle.

Thanks for the detailed info!!

You are right - couldn't live with myself if something happened from a malfunction

Rebuilt huh? Only one way to know for sure if they rebuilt the airbags.

Just remember a rebuilt title can mean several things but ultimately the insurance did not want to fix the car or felt it was cheaper to salvage it. . Technically they can all be fixed unless they're burnt to the ground. There are some good rebuilt titles out there with relatively minor accidents. You just have to do your research.

I've bought a few. Just get a good understanding of what was wrong and how it was fixed. My daughter has a Trax that had been hit in the rear. Some things are not that big of a deal. I'm impressed with the guy above that bought a flooded Corvette. Probably a little braver than I would be.

50% of Texas Direct customers were very brave, they just didn't realize it at the time.

It seems impossible to find out who actually rebuilt it unless the seller actually knows. CarFax's big weakness is that it does not show who did the rebuild or other body work.

A quick tip is to just Google the VIN- it typically brings up pics of the vehicle pre-repair on sites that have auctions.

Is there anyway to tell if the airbags are still good or if they got deployed?