Used Auto Sales / Trading Websites?

I am not in dire need of a new ride at the moment, but do need to put a plan together in the near future because I can tell my days are numbered with the blazer.

I for the life of me can't find a reliable website to search listings.
Ebay motors fucking sucks.period.
Cars.com is lacking..
Craigslist is the best IMO, but it is only good at the local scale. I will not buy new for a long time and would seriously consider having a car shipped from the south/across country if it is the right one. The problem is I don't have time to keep up with listings in 15 or so states, especially when they are broken down into cities and regions on top of that.

What do people recommend?

Autotrader, bought my Ram from a dealer near Detroit that had listed with them.
What do you find missing from Cars.com? I find a lot [not all] of the listings overlap with Autotrader. And you can sort by listing date on Cars, which is key. Are you looking for private seller ads?

For Craigslist use http://www.searchtempest.com if you are looking for specific vehicles or one of the other CL search engines.

I have found lots of good deals at Sonic.

http://www.sonicautomotive.com/

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Originally Posted by Vt-Freeheel

Autotrader, bought my Ram from a dealer near Detroit that had listed with them.
What do you find missing from Cars.com? I find a lot [not all] of the listings overlap with Autotrader. And you can sort by listing date on Cars, which is key. Are you looking for private seller ads?

For Craigslist use http://www.searchtempest.com if you are looking for specific vehicles or one of the other CL search engines.

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I second search tempest. It takes some dedication and can be slightly tedious because it pulls up results where the author has deleted it or it has expired.

I used Craigslist Searchtempest.com for awhile. As stated it can be helpful if you have a specific vehicle in mind (such as specific years and generation series of an auto) outside your local or near local (within so many miles).

Looking at dealers and lots then there are other sites out there. If you want more control over specific items like mileage, colors, options and other things in addition to budget, take a look at cargurus.com and their advanced searching. Dealers ratings, number of days the listing has been on the site and very good controls to eliminate things that could be deal killers.

Thanks guys, I had never heard of search tempest. Pretty cool site. Definitely a little tedious since you can't refine the search by miles, which is the main rule out factor for me. But I can definitely see it being helpful for searching special / niche models - mainly what I'm interested in.

I don't understand the problem with cars.com, seems to work pretty well for me. When I was searching, I used it and autotrader and searchtempest.

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Originally Posted by east or bust

Thanks guys, I had never heard of search tempest. Pretty cool site. Definitely a little tedious since you can't refine the search by miles, which is the main rule out factor for me. But I can definitely see it being helpful for searching special / niche models - mainly what I'm interested in.

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Are you sure about the lack of search by the searching by miles? It clearly has a spot to enter your zip code and then the miles around that (200, 400 etc,) and help on can you pick cities, what else do you want:

https://searchtempest.zendesk.com/hc...nd-a-zip-code-

I also forgot about it's sister site for cars only Autotempest.com which allows searching Craigslist, Ebay Motors, Cars.com, Autotrader, Carsdirect, oodle.com also.

http://www.autotempest.com/

he meant refine the search by miles on the car, not distance of the car to him.

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Originally Posted by Danno

he meant refine the search by miles on the car, not distance of the car to him.

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Ok, missed that, but Cargurus.com allows that.

Ok, just checked out car guru and it's pretty good. The search engine is slick and there are a lot of models to choose from.

I will admit I'm kind of picky and a lot of the time searching for special models that are hard to find under a blanket designation 'x'. That's why I tend to like keyword searches more.