Maintenance / Before you buy
Pre-Purchase Inspection in Mississauga
$159 to find out what a $15,000 car is hiding. Two hours on the hoist, a full diagnostic scan, a road test, photographs of everything worth photographing, and a phone call at the end where we tell you plainly whether we’d buy it.
If the seller won’t allow an inspection, that’s your answer. Someone with nothing to hide has no reason to refuse. It’s the clearest warning sign in a private sale, and it costs you nothing to walk.
01 / Coverage
120 points, in four groups
Body & rust
Rockers, subframe mounts, strut towers, floor pans, panel gaps and paint depth readings that reveal past accident repair.
Engine & drivetrain
Leaks, compression where indicated, cooling system pressure, transmission behaviour, drive shafts, mounts and belts.
Full system scan
Every module, including stored and pending codes the seller may have cleared last week and readiness monitors that show it.
Brakes, tires, suspension
Measured, not eyeballed. Plus an estimate of what each item will cost when it needs doing.
02 / What you get
The report is the product
- Written report — 120 items, each pass, monitor or fail
- Photographs — every fault, plus the underside
- Two-year cost forecast — what it’ll need and roughly what that costs
- Scan printout — including cleared-code evidence
- A phone call — the part people actually want
The report is yours. Plenty of people use it to negotiate the price down by more than the inspection cost, which is a perfectly good outcome.
Readiness monitors are the trick worth knowing. If a seller clears fault codes before a viewing, the check engine light goes out — but the monitors reset too, and they take dozens of kilometres of mixed driving to complete. A car with a clean dash and incomplete monitors was scanned very recently, and we’ll see it.
03 / Price
What it costs
| Inspection | Price |
|---|---|
| Standard 120-point inspection | $159 |
| Extended — includes compression test and paint depth mapping | $249 |
| European or performance vehicle | $219 |
| Add Safety Standards Certificate on the same visit | +$79 |
| Second inspection within 30 days (another car) | $129 |
The last line exists because most people don’t buy the first car they inspect, and charging full price twice for that felt wrong.
Questions
Before you go and see it
How is this different from a safety certificate?
A safety certificate says the car met a minimum legal standard that day. A pre-purchase inspection tells you its actual condition and what it’ll cost you over two years. A car can pass a safety and still be a terrible buy.
What if the seller refuses?
Walk. There is always another car.
Can you come to the seller?
No — a proper inspection needs a hoist, and the underside is where rust and leaks live. A driveway inspection is half an inspection.
What about dealer cars?
Same inspection, and dealers generally allow it. If a dealer refuses an independent inspection on a used car, that tells you something about the dealer.