Craigslist in Seattle has a 2015 S550 with 15K miles listed for 65K, it has a branded title for theft recovery. Just curious, does MBUSA honor the warranty on this car? I suspect it is way overpriced due to the title issue but was wondering if the warranty is effected. Not looking to buy, just curious.

 

Branded title is automatic half value. Thus if an average cond 550 4matic with 15k miles is 70k this one should be 35-40k tops. Branded title means total insurance loss. Those are usually also blacklisted for warranty work with mbusa.

 

They're sometimes a total loss in purely a business sense. The carrier has sixty days to either find the car or declare it a total and buy it from their insured.

Sometimes the carrier pays out and the car shows up later with little or no damage. It becomes the carrier's property to dispose of an recoup some of their money. They're usually not real concerned about top dollar recovery since they hadn't planned on the thing ever showing up anyway. It's actually more of a hassle than anything else.

Short version, recovered thefts can be a great deal on an otherwise perfectly good car with a crappy title.

 

Well laid out.

That car is a good deal assuming it is free of extensive damage and was simply declared a loss cause it wasn't recovered on time.

 

You can find non-branded title 2015 S550's with the same miles for the same price. Here's another Craigslist example from Seattle:

https://seattle.craigslist.org/see/ctd/5962301814.html

 

In my experience a Mercedes theft almost always is a fraud since the cars are very difficult to steal without a key. Typically the owner is under water financially and wants to unload the car but avoid a repo.

I had a guy hide his $70,000 SL in a rental storage unit four hours away, planning to ride out the sixty days. In my first meeting he was unable to produce the keys, yet he claimed the car was left locked at his business, a bar, and was stolen overnight.

Ultimately I figured out that he was in danger of losing the bar and had equity in the car he needed, but the condition was so rough nobody would give him anything for it. He arranged for a friend to drive the car down to Miami and hide it.

His biggest screw up was failing to realize that MB keeps a record of keys it's issued against a VIN, and the guy had bought a key the day before the "theft". He had sent one of his bar employees to collect the key, which the employee signed for.

I tracked the employee down and he was in no mood to be complicit in a felony, so he rolled over on his boss. We denied the claim and the next day police notified us the car had been recovered in an airport parking lot. Good times.

 

Actually benzes are not any different than toyotas as far as the prepared thief is concerned. Most benzes are stolen because there is an "order" for such a car from South America, Eastern Europe, Russia or sometimes Africa. The ones that are recovered are almost never in good shape as they are stolen for parts (as opposed to export) and tbus lots of parts are missing.

A stolen and recovered high end car can be an insurance fraud and thus unmolested, but most of the time is not a good deal in regards to the problems it might have down the road.

 

Except you can't walk into a hardware store and get your Mercedes key duplicated like you can for a Toyota. Granted this was 20 years ago and most manufacturers didn't have chipped keys. But yeah, like any used car it's impossible to know how it was treated by its former owner (or thief).

 

The equipment to create mb keyless go keys is freely available to be purchased online at a very fair (for what it does) price.

 

Fortunately our insureds weren't quite cunning enough to invest in their own key mastering and encoding equipment. They were more the miss three payments, lets do something stupid type.

 

seems you can pretty much buy a cpo car at 65k. Now if that car was truley 50% off at 35-40 it would have been sold really quik!

Heard a story of some new s550's getting flood damage at a lot and were salvaged so no warty, friend of someone I knew bought one at 70k, they were new though and ran and drove.wartys were obviosly no good.

 

I once was shown an almost brand new E class with no VIN on the windshield inside a garage that was full of lux cars by a shady eastern european guy in a weird part of Century City, LA. I found his marked down offer on cars.com and it was a too-good-to-be-true offer price-wise. He gave me a BS story as to why most of his cars were VIN-less. All of them were well below market price. I'm certain that they were stolen.

I wanted to export the car so his deal didn't matter as I wouldn't have been able to get it through customs though he assured me he would have had it exported through "his contacts" at the port. But then I would have been on my own on the import side.

 

It sounds like he might have gotten away with it had he not bought the extra key and simply handed over the original(s). People will do anything - nothing surprises me anymore.

 

The employee he sent to pick up the extra key rolled over on him and confessed that on the night the car was slated to disappear the insured held a staff meeting to explain that someone was coming up from Miami to take the car but if anybody asks them they last saw it parked outside the club when the bar closed.

The insured was engaged in a power struggle with a partner and the kid felt that if the insured got caught in the theft fraud the partner, who he preferred, would end up owning the club.