Third Millennium Car Buying in L.A.

The full name of Los Angeles, California, is “El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Poriuncula.” By the time you finish saying the whole thing, with a good accent or a bad one, the population will have gone up by another few hundred folks or so.

Perhaps the city is not growing quite that fast, but its population is edging up toward 4 million today, from 3.4 million in 1990. What is called the “greater Los Angeles County area” is now home to over 10 million people. L.A. is the second most populous city in the United States; along with Miami the most culturally diverse; and it is said that there are so many automobiles (1 for every 1.8 people) that they make up almost one quarter of the city’s 469 square mile land area. Put all these facts together and what can one conclude about Los Angeles?

Well, whatever else anyone might say about the City of Angels -- or even Hollywood, the City of Angles -- Los Angeles in the third millennium is a great place to buy (or sell) a used car. Maybe the best place.

Millions of people, millions of cars, a percolating economy, a real estate boom and low unemployment: throw in a little upward mobility and some easy credit and your recipe for a world-class used car market is complete. Besides the “pre-owned” inventories at hundreds of automaker franchises -- the Toyota, Chevy and Volkswagen dealers like everywhere else, and the Ferrari, Lamborghini and Bentley dealers like almost nowhere else -- there are literally hundreds of thousands more deals to be made for a used car in Los Angeles.

Tell 'em Vinny sent you

There are the classified sections of two major and half a dozen minor daily and weekly newspapers; any number of specialty “auto trader” tabloids that come out weekly or monthly; junk-mail shopper “zines” like The Pennysaver; and that’s only the traditional, ink-on-paper media. The real action in the Los Angeles used car market, where knowledgeable buyers meet with motivated sellers to hammer out those fabled “win-win deals,” are at opposite ends of the popular consciousness: the always-on, everyone-welcome Internet and the near-mythic, hard to find, tell-ëem-Vinnie-sent-you used car auctions.

Among the countless classified blurbs, and sometimes ganged up in small display ads on the back of the newspapers’ business and sports sections, are announcements of auto auctions that beckon with “public welcome.” As every used car salesman in Los Angeles (and everywhere else) knows, the good auto auctions don’t advertise. They don’t have to. They don’t even want to; they’re doing just fine with their elite clientele and seemingly endless supply of “government seized vehicles.”

Regarding actual, matter-of-factual Los Angeles used car auctions where 2003 Jaguar sedans go for six or eight grand, the Buddha likely would have commented, “Those who say don’t know, those who know don’t say.” So unless you know a fleet services manager at a car dealership, the owner of a city-licensed towing company or a dues-paying member of the Professional Auctioneers Association, you probably won’t buy your next used car at a Los Angeles-area auction. Not the “good” kind, anyway.

Where, then? After reading all the classifieds, thumbing through the auto tabloids at the 7-11, visiting the local dealers of both domestic and imported brands, and strolling through Joselito’s Auto-Rama (“con los precios abajos”), you’re down to just one last option -- and it’s the most modern, fastest growing, highest volume, most consumer-friendly way to buy or sell a used car today, in Los Angeles or anywhere else.

Net nexus gets Lexus

It’s the Internet, of course. Now, through the marvel of modern technology that George Jetson never even dreamed of, the whole world of autos is available to you, augmenting what was already the largest used car market on the planet. But the fact is, the next used car that you buy in Los Angeles might be sold to you by a fellow in Reno, Nevada. With Web sites like Cars.com, Vehix, AutoTrader and scores of others -- not to mention the new 800-pound gorilla of car sales, eBay -- you can literally search the entire used car inventory of, well, the planet, remember? Not everyone will want to fly to Reno to drive their “new used car” home, but if you are looking for a rare Porsche 550 Spyder like the one that James Dean crashed and died in, you might have to travel a bit.

What’s a few miles when your dream car is available? Before the advent of the Internet, there were special “car search” companies that would, for a hefty fee, seek out and locate just the car you were looking for. Now that used car deals, in a stroke of computer-age irony, are among the most frequent travelers on the information superhighway, these companies have been sentenced to the proverbial dustbin of history.

The used car market, in Los Angeles and everywhere else that a phone line, cable or satellite can bring the Internet, is firmly back in the hands of individual buyers and sellers. It’s a mind-blowing situation to ponder: millions of people making millions of individual choices about millions of different used cars rolling down the streets and highways of Los Angeles.

And just as L.A. shoppers can buy over the Internet from a car seller in Arizona, those retirees in Lake Havasu City can grab a bit of Tinseltown glitz by buying their new car from a guy living near Hollywood and Vine. It’s as simple as logging on, heading to Google and typing in “used cars Los Angeles.”

Of course, if the old folks don’t know exactly what they want, they might not live long enough to find their dream car. That Google search will result in about, oh, 60 or 65 million hits.