There are several avenues in which you can buy a car. One of the places you can purchase a vehicle is through a car auction. Even with car auctions you have a couple of different places to choose from depending on where you live. For instance if you live in a smaller town you probably have one or two places to choose from for private car auctions. If you live in a larger city not only will you have the private car auctions but you will also have the police auctions. We will discuss both types of auctions in this article as well as some of the things to be wary of.

First police auctions are usually going to contain older police cars they are retiring as well as cars they may have seized in raids and other police activity where they confiscated the items. This means you could find some really nice cars and a great discount or not find much. Usually the police auctions are held when there are a lot of items to put up for sale. You should also realize that they are not solely car auctions, often time boats and other types of motored vehicles are going to be on the list for sale. The police auctions are also going to offer less in the way of prices in most cases. Since they seized the items all they are really looking for is more income to put back into the department spending budget. This means you can find a car that is within your price range fairly easily. The downside is they don't always have the type of car you might be interested in.

For a specific model vehicle you would have more luck trying the private auctions. Private auctions are when a company has cars on the lot from an owner that is looking to sell their car quickly and easily. For most of us this is a last resort for selling a vehicle to try and get what we believe is a worthy price. The owner therefore sets the price of the vehicle and if the bids never reach that number to car will remain unsold. The owner does have the option of selling for under their price, but that is a phone call before it could be released. At car auctions they are going to start the biding a little lower than the actual price of the vehicle to get the sale started.

Now that you know about the two different auctions let's look at a few things you should know. First at a car buying auction you are not going to be able to test drive the car. You can ask to look at the engine, to hear the engine run, but you can't actually go off the lot with the car. This means you are looking over the car, but not fully testing it and you could wind up with something that has a lot of mechanical issues if you are not careful. Most often the car auction will have a mechanic on hand to test drive the vehicle as well as look it over before the auction starts.