Purchasing used car in "salt belt"

[kobrian85]

Something that my old man hit me with the other day - He suggested that I steer clear of a used vehicle that is located in a "salt belt" state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_Belt

Part of me thinks this is kind of ridiculous and I'm over thinking it, part of me thinks it's probably not the worst advise... There isn't much about this topic via google pertaining late model vehicles (maybe my search parameters stink...). Is this really something to keep in mind with 2010-2014 vehicles? Or is this something only worth considering if I were in the market for say a '94 Wrangler?

What do you think?

[pdqgp]

It's not so much about rust anymore. I live in the salt belt here in Ohio. We throw more salt and Calcium Chloride and sand than we get snow. It's crazy. Anytime between Nov and March the roads and cars are filled with white powder. During a 1" snow fall I'll have piles of salt fall out of the rear bumper and wheel wells of our cars.

What you really need to look out for and one reason I insisted on buying my S4 from a source that would get it from the West coast was I didn't want road-rash issues. Every single one I looked near the dealers in IL or OH were in some way impacted with small chips and sandblasting. To me that's the real reason not to buy from the snow belt.

We have lots of 10-15yr old vehicles in the area that show zero signs of rust. The ones that do are owned by pin heads that never wash them and are ones that just get beat up. Repairs that are delayed or never done begin to rust, etc.

[smonska]

This isn't important if it's a car people didn't likely to drive in the winter, like a Corvette or GT500 Mustang, even Audis people were using as a garage queen and not as a daily driver, I'd buy one of those from the salt belt. It is however, death to trucks and most AWD vehicles that people intentionally use in the winter.

I live in western Massachusetts, and will travel many miles south from where I live to get a car that has seen much less salt. I traveled all the way to Texas to buy my 5 year old truck for example and it was 10X cleaner than anything for sale locally. My A4 came from the Long Island area, which while still using salt, has way less than where I live.

The question is, was this S4 a garage queen or was it a winter driven daily?

[LeadToRome]

For the same price I'd take the Sun Belt car every time. But salt is not the issue it used to be, that's for sure. Besides, doesn't everybody buy the premium undercoating from the dealer? j/k

[pdqgp]

The question is, was this S4 a garage queen or was it a winter driven daily?

Nope. My S4 was driven by a manager at Audi's Testing Center in California. He get's a new car every 6-12 months and had mine in service for 6 months only putting 8,000 miles on it. He got an SQ5 after mine. I talked to him live as when I took delivery of the car through the dealer in Chicago that buys a lot of their executive cars and brings them in from all over, he had left a sim card for a cell phone in it and I got his contact information from there. Whoever prepped the car inserted it into the dash thinking that's where it went.

I paid a little more for my car vs the 6 others that were in the surrounding area but mine was 100% spotless whereas the others all had something wrong, either skuffs, rash, wear, something. Even the tires on mine were nearly perfect. He's a mature fellow by voice so my guess is he never did any spirited driving. I told those I was shopping that I was looking for a completely spotless car and wasn't interested in saving $3-5k for a typical IL or OH driven used car. Ended up saving $15k off MSRP. Worth it to me.

I grew up in the car business with my parents owning several so I always tend to source very low mileage cars from the right places. Even our minivan was only 4 mos old with 4,000 miles on it when I got it. Saved over $10k from MSRP on it. Ironically both our current cars where sourced by dealers in Chicago.

[mr shickadance]

with modern paint and clears these days I would not see it as a big problem. Also pretty sure the entire VAG group has their metal galvanized prior to paint therefore rust is really not as big an issue as it used to be.