When looking at any vehicle from 10+ feet away, the texture of the orange peel will show what panels were painted under the same conditions. It is common for some vehicles to get painted in pieces for later Assembly, especially bumper covers, door handles, and side mirrors. Doors and fenders usually get the jams painted, then are painted continuously while mounted. This pattern of jamming will show on the fender fasteners and in other areas where fastening hardware will be painted over or not. Any inconsistencies here show that the panel has been removed and worked on. When repairing a panel, no one short of a $30k restoration job on a classic is going to replicate the same jamming and then panel work techniques. Consumers don’t even know to look at the jams.

In almost every major crash, the panel gaps will be moved significantly. This is another easy thing to look for. Use the fingernail on your little finger to gage the gaps for consistency all around the car.

Look at the under side seam that is spot welded between the tires of most unibody vehicles. No one properly repaints and repairs this seam that is completely out of sight and the minds of most. If it is mangled crumpled, or cut and rewelded the car has been crashed.

Inspections do little to tell the truth of a vehicle’s history. Most of the crashed cars I worked on were trade ins that someone did to avoid insurance claims, and I’ve seen illegal shops welding halves with clean titles. All the any history report means was that someone was willing to suffer paying for a second vehicle’s worth of insurance premiums because they filed a claim or the crash resulted in a police report. Around half or more of all crashes are fixed in private without involving insurance at all and therefore result in a clean title.

Auto body work is almost always outsourced by dealers. Disclosing dubious damage is not the goal of such inspections or their actual purpose. The inspection is actually the lot prep framework used for 3rd party vendors and the service department for the dealership.

With my auto body shop, I would go to many dealers on auction delivery day, look over the dozen or so cars they purchased, and grab the keys for the ones I was going to work on. I didn’t need to talk to or interact with anyone. The inspection checklist on the back end is my guide on what level of repairs they wanted to make on each vehicle that needed it. I decided if the detailers needed to clean up the vehicle first or if I should let the paintless dent guy do his thing before I worked on damage. I generally came before the service department unless they already knew of an issue with the transporter truck loading/unloading.

There are many shady things that can happen in this process. Most auction vehicles are repossessions and most people are not… kind with vehicles they know are going to get repo’d. Judging by the age, depending on the dealer, yours may be a lease return. Those are usually sold from the new car dealer directly to the used car lot under the same roof but are usually separate LLCs.

I haven’t been into cars since steering by wire was a thing. I doubt there is calibration or compensation for this kind of system. I really hope there is not TBH. I do not trust such a system at all as it is a potential massive vulnerability for digital security with no incentive to secure older systems. If everything on a moving vehicle fails, I expect the steering and brakes to still fundamentally work under all conditions so that I am able to safely stop. For that reason, I expect the steering to be entirely self contained with some kind of backup failsafe redundancy.