It's amazing to me that car buyers still willingly hand over significant sums of money without knowing what they're buying. It's one thing to buy a car with some gaps in its mechanical history, but to purchase a so-called "restored" car with horribly dodgy repairs clearly intended to mask massive shortcomings in a vehicle's integrity is the sort of oversight that shouldn't still be happening.
Uncle Tony's Garage is somewhat popular YouTube channel that lately has been calling out the scoundrels of the car collecting hobby, and this latest episode features a Mercury Cougar sold via auction to a collector who paid for a "restored" car - the trouble is, the paint job was the convenient distraction from a total hack job underneath.
As the video goes to show, the mechanic tasked with inspecting his customer's purchase has the unenviable task of telling the buyer that has has paid $40,000 for a car that needs an additional $40,000 worth of bodywork. The video doesn't lie, showing what looks like a mixture of bondo and undercoating to paper over massive holes in the Mercury's floor and frame. Uncle Tony points out that buyers routinely go to car auctions and effectively hold their breath and jump into costly investments with little to no proof of the integrity of the restoration work.
If the industry had standards that encouraged buyers to see proof of a seller's claims, or if the auction houses themselves embraced such an approach, incidents like these would happen far less frequently. But for the time being, the canned response is often that a buyer should have done their homework.
If auction houses shamed bad sellers and utilized technology tools that provide an exploded view of a car's mechanical and cosmetic integrity, perhaps stories such as the one told here would happen far less frequently.