A few questions about a car I was thinking of buying

[RakkCity]

Came across an ad for a 2014 S4 Prestige about a week ago, ended up putting a deposit down based on the pictures and ad description, and got approved for financing with a great interest rate as well. It checked all my boxes, including:

-Manual Trans
-Sport Diff
-Silver Exterior
-Red Interior
-B&O
-MMI
-Driver Assist Package
-No mods, 100% stock

81k miles, $22800 plus TTL. Screaming deal, or so I thought.

Since the car is across the country, I had a local Audi dealer do a PPI, and they found, among some very minor maintenance things, a few problems:

-Driver's front fender has been repainted, shade of silver does not match the rest of the car
-Passenger side headlight is tweaked out of position, does not match body lines, and missing one of the mounting bolts (probably an easy fix)
-Windshield was replaced at some point with a non-OEM piece
-DTC was stored: 00139 - Left Front Body Acceleration Sensor (G341) Mechanical Malfunction
-Steering wheel was off-center, recommended an alignment to fix

They didn't mention any frame damage or other serious issues, and had very good things to say about how it looked and drove aside from the aforementioned items. But it definitely seems as though it was in an accident, and the windshield being replaced is pretty weird (also, wouldn't a non-OEM windshield render the rain-sensing wipers useless?).

Am I crazy for wanting to back out of the deal? I've been checking listing sites on a daily basis for 6 months and this is the first car that came up that I actually wanted to buy, but given this new information I feel like I'd be making a bad decision in the long run. The fender paint mismatch would drive me crazy until I fixed it, and the sensor malfunction could be an easy fix, or could mean more serious underlying damage. If anyone has any experience with this trouble code, some guidance would be much appreciated.

Any thoughts on this? Would negotiating down the price be worth it, or could this be a headache car no matter how cheap I haggle it down to (I've heard the adaptive cruise control can present a lot of issues with sensors going bad and popping up warnings on the DIS non-stop)?

I've had my B7 for 5 years and put a ton of work and money into it, but eventually I'm going to get into something newer. I just hope passing up this car won't mean I'll be stuck looking for another year or more while I deal with more and more maintenance on my current ride. I've attached a pic where you can see the color mismatch (inked out the dealer name to be safe), I was hoping it was just the lighting in the pictures but the Audi dealership confirmed it's not factory paint.

Thanks in advance!
-Rakk

[GTSJeff]

I need to replace my windshield every couple years due to rock chips, so that doesn’t seem weird at all to me.

But yeah as for the rest, I would never buy a car that was owned by a lazy and uncaring owner. If that person is fine with mismatched paint and crooked headlights, they’re also probably fine with not warming it up properly, ignoring oil change intervals, etc. Fuck those people.


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[Silver Streakin]

When in doubt, pull out.

[agentsmith988]

There are aftermarket windshields that are optioned for rain sensing wipers so that's not an issue. Did the dealer give you a Carfax report? Definitely looks like it was in an accident and someone did a half-baked repair. That color match looks pretty terrible from that photo.

[RakkCity]

There are aftermarket windshields that are optioned for rain sensing wipers so that's not an issue. Did the dealer give you a Carfax report? Definitely looks like it was in an accident and someone did a half-baked repair. That color match looks pretty terrible from that photo.

It's getting sketchier and sketchier the more I think back on our multiple conversations (the sales associate and/or the finance manager and I).

The ad on Car Gurus had a vehicle history report, but it wasn't a CarFax. The last record was dated in 2014 and it stated 2 owner, previous fleet vehicle. The dealership told me it was 1 owner (fleet) and was immaculate, save for some flaws on the passenger door paint which they sent a picture of. The color mismatch doesn't look quite as bad in the other photos, nor in the video walkthrough done by Audi. But really, any mismatch is an eyesore to an enthusiast, especially one front and center walking up to your car.

The PPI revealed many more flaws than the dealership stated, and clear evidence of some kind of collision which was never mentioned. Audi also gave me a CarFax which shows maintenance records up to 2020, and shows it was a fleet vehicle until 2014 and personal use until it was traded in last month. The windshield replacement also left some scratches/tears on the A-pillar adjacent the glass.

Definitely a lot of half-assed work done on this car. The misaligned steering is probably related to the accident, the sensor fault, the poor paint match, the aftermarket glass, the obviously crooked headlight (see attached), it's just all too much no matter how great the rest of the car looks.

Thanks for the responses guys, I'll be backing out and asking for my deposit back and/or issuing a chargeback through my CC provider if needed. $350 was a bit more than I wanted to spend on a PPI, but it was worth it to get a second set of eyes on the car before flying out there.

Cheers.

[agentsmith988]

It's getting sketchier and sketchier the more I think back on our multiple conversations (the sales associate and/or the finance manager and I).

The ad on Car Gurus had a vehicle history report, but it wasn't a CarFax. The last record was dated in 2014 and it stated 2 owner, previous fleet vehicle. The dealership told me it was 1 owner (fleet) and was immaculate, save for some flaws on the passenger door paint which they sent a picture of. The color mismatch doesn't look quite as bad in the other photos, nor in the video walkthrough done by Audi. But really, any mismatch is an eyesore to an enthusiast, especially one front and center walking up to your car.

The PPI revealed many more flaws than the dealership stated, and clear evidence of some kind of collision which was never mentioned. Audi also gave me a CarFax which shows maintenance records up to 2020, and shows it was a fleet vehicle until 2014 and personal use until it was traded in last month. The windshield replacement also left some scratches/tears on the A-pillar adjacent the glass.

Definitely a lot of half-assed work done on this car. The misaligned steering is probably related to the accident, the sensor fault, the poor paint match, the aftermarket glass, the obviously crooked headlight (see attached), it's just all too much no matter how great the rest of the car looks.

Thanks for the responses guys, I'll be backing out and asking for my deposit back and/or issuing a chargeback through my CC provider if needed. $350 was a bit more than I wanted to spend on a PPI, but it was worth it to get a second set of eyes on the car before flying out there.

Cheers.

A good call for sure. That thing sounds like a hot mess.