4 ms·

If the previous owner only changed oil once (just before trading the car in), how would CarMax or Carfax know?

• smacktoward 8y ago
  They would know it had missed a bunch of scheduled maintenance. They know how many miles are on the car, they know how many times it should have had its oil changed over that many miles. If the owner never brought it in for service, you can say maybe they were just a gear-head and were changing the oil themselves in their garage. But there's lots of service tasks you can't do in your garage, so if the car missed lots of scheduled maintenance windows, that puts up a big red flag.
  • kbutler 8y ago
    Oil changes often don't get recorded.
  • pps43 8y ago
    Typical lease is three years. In that timeframe there isn't a bunch of scheduled maintenance. You need to pass state inspection a couple of times, but apart from that there's normally nothing really to service yet. From the carfax report the owner who did the oil changes on schedule with quality synthetic oil looks indistinguishable from the one who did nothing and drove the car like a rental. An you can't tell what's inside the engine block until you open it up.