Carmax emails are persisting that I write a review so here it is...though now they may wish that they never asked. I was looking for a particular model and year vehicle and by sheer luck, patience and persistence happened to find one on their website with very, very low miles. (One nice thing about Carmax, it's easy and free to transfer a vehicle between locations, which I did).
The sales rep called me when the transfer was in process and I expressed concerns about the tires being a bit old as the car still had the original rubber on it. I was told "oh they have been changed by now. We will have your car all clean and ready for you."
It arrived and first thing I look at is the DOT codes on the tires. Sure enough, they are nearly 8 years old. Within the legal limit but not exactly safe. The interior was sort of clean but nothing special and the outside had something funky on it. It looked like a huge seagull scored a hit on the door. There were big splotches of something that was starting to eat through the clearcoat to such a degree that they had to power buff the door to remove them. Not too clean people.
They did buff the area out...and I'm not going to spend a great deal of time talking about their prices except that a large pricing error in my favor, which they had to honor because it was on the sticker, was the ONLY reason the car was priced fairly. What they meant to sell it for was way too high.
I drove the car home and just on that short drive a surface crack about an inch and a half long opened up on the sidewall of one of the tires. So I call their service manager the following Monday to ask for some help on the tires. He tells me Carmax will use tires up to the legal 10-year limit as long as they've no structural tears (to be fair the crack was just cosmetic) and have enough tread. Again, legal but cheap and not real smart or safe.
While driving home, I also noticed the right headlamp was shining on the ground not 15 feet in front of the car. This is fine as long as you don't exceed 5 mph, but for those of us drive around the speed limit, unacceptable. So I later grabbed a screwdriver to adjust it. Nothing doing. Carmax had improperly installed a new bulb and dislocated the adjuster. On this car, you have to take the front bumper cover and headlight off to fix that, so I have some work ahead. But at this point I would not want them working on my car, haha. So I did not pursue the headlight issue.
Oh yes, the car has a keyless entry keypad. A truly great convenience feature for a car to have, but they could not provide the code or promise to access it for me. When I was persistent asking for help on this, the salesman got defensive. "Well if that's going to be the deal breaker" he says. So I jump on YouTube the next day and find the how-to in less than a half hour and access the code myself.
I think It's abundantly clear by now I would not buy another car from Carmax. In this case, this was a used car that had been driven so little and cared for by the previous owner so well, and had such low miles I could not pass. It was a special bit of luck to find the car in that condition anywhere. The car was almost an exact copy of one I had wanted back in 2012, when they were brand new on the dealership lots, but could not afford. Great car but not a credit to Carmax, rather to the previous owner.
My rating: one star for a weak effort and a horrible lack of product knowledge and another for the easy and helpful vehicle transfer service. read more