Jacksonville Used Cars – Understanding Lights & Gauges

Jacksonville Used Cars – Understanding Lights & Gauges

By Steve & Beth Kicklighter

For the next ten weeks we would like to talk about the top ten things we look for and recommend you look for when purchasing your next pre-owned vehicle.  These ten items are not in a particular order of importance, but they are all things we feel will help insure value when shopping for a car and could prevent you from making a horrible mistake

Week One: Instrument Lights and Gauges:

Many people assume when purchasing a vehicle that all Instrument lights and gauges are working properly.  Many times they are not. In some cases we have seen lights that have been deliberately and intentionally tampered with.  An unscrupulous seller will do this so that an obvious problem with the vehicle is not readily apparent.  You as a buyer would find out about this problem once the deal was done and you drove away with your purchase.  Most manufacturers engineer their vehicles so that when you turn the ignition on all the vehicles instrument lights come on. As the car’s ignition is started those lights will turn off if no problem exists. 

Recently while inspecting a vehicle we were considering for purchase we preformed this test and discovered that the air bag light was not seen.  Having to put on glasses to investigate closer we were quite shocked to find that someone had placed black electrical tape over the airbag light.  Upon removing the tape we discovered someone had punched a small hole in the instrument cluster to destroy the light and keep it from glowing under the tape, which made it impossible to replace the light in the instrument cluster.  The reason they had done this was because the air bag on the passenger side was totally missing.

 

Surprisingly, the cost to replace and reprogram the damaged instrument cluster is about twice as much as simply replacing the air bag!  In another case someone had simply taken a black magic marker and colored over a glowing check engine light.  We have seen this deliberate tampering many times in our inspections of vehicles. As your trusted automotive professionals we take these inspections seriously in order to uncover these problems and deliver quality vehicles to our customers.

The last place you want to find out about this kind of tampering is when the vehicle stops running and you are stuck on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck pondering how much of a bite the repair is going to take.  So take care and be aware of this tactic when purchasing a vehicle. 

Beth & Steve Kicklighter own and operate Kicklighter Auto Sales in Jacksonville, Florida.  Visit their website at http://jacksonville-used-cars.com