Design mockup. Driveway Motors is not a real business. Every name, address, phone number, vehicle, price and photograph on this page is invented.

Driveway Motors

Used cars and trucks. Lathrop, Missouri, since 2003.

Call the lot (816) 555-0142

We can tell you where every car on this lot was bought, and who we bought it from.

A used car has a life before it reaches a front row, and that life is the thing that decides whether it is a good car. Almost nobody publishes it. We buy fifteen or twenty vehicles a month, one at a time, and the four of us who work here have stood next to every one of them before the money moved.

So this page opens with our buying record rather than with our inventory. Below is where the last hundred cars we put out front actually came from, counted honestly, including the sources we will not touch.

The last one hundred cars we put out front

Counted from our own purchase book, oldest at the left. Updated the first Tuesday of the month.

  1. 41 traded in by a local customer
  2. 33 bought directly out of a private driveway
  3. 19 bought as a trade with another dealer
  4. 7 bought off lease from a franchise store

Auction lanes, rental fleet disposals, insurance sales and flood sales

0 of the last 100

  • 41 Traded in at this counter
  • 33 Bought out of a driveway
  • 19 Traded with another dealer
  • 7 Bought off lease
The lot at dusk: about a dozen used sedans, pickups and SUVs parked in two angled rows on cracked asphalt in front of a small lit cinderblock office, with a grain elevator and a bare tree line behind.
Two rows, and that is the whole lot. If a car is not standing here it is not for sale here.

The five places a used car can come from

These are the only five channels there are. Every dealer in the country buys from some mix of them, and the mix is the single most useful thing you can know about a lot. Ours is printed above. Here is what each one means and what we do about it.

01

Traded in at this counter

We buy these first

Somebody in Lathrop or Plattsburg or Holt drives in, buys something newer from us, and leaves the old one. We have usually serviced it, we know the person, and we know whether it sat outside all winter. This is the best car a small lot ever gets and it is the reason a lot like ours exists at all.

Forty-one of our last hundred came in this way. A metro store with thirty salespeople takes trades too, but it sends most of them straight to a wholesale auction because it cannot afford to detail and recondition a nine year old Equinox. We can, because we are four people and we do the work ourselves.

41of the last 100

02

Bought out of a driveway

We drive out and get these

A private seller who wants to be done with it. Somebody moving into assisted living, an estate being cleared, a household that went from three cars to two. We answer the ad, we drive to the house, and we buy it in the driveway with a cashier's check.

This is slow and it does not scale, which is exactly why the big stores do not do it. It is also where the one owner, garage kept, folder of receipts cars come from. Thirty-three of the last hundred. When we tell you a car came out of a driveway in Cameron, we mean we stood in that driveway.

33of the last 100

A man in a canvas work jacket standing beside an older silver sedan at the kerb outside a small ranch house, holding a folded title and a set of keys, talking to an elderly couple on their front step.
The second most common way a car gets onto this lot. It takes half a day and we buy about eight a month like this.

03

Traded with another dealer

We buy these with the file open

Another store took a trade it does not want to retail, usually because it is the wrong brand for their lot or too old for their finance sources. We drive up, we look at it, and if the paperwork is complete we buy it.

The risk here is real and we will name it. A dealer trade is a car somebody else already decided not to keep, and the honest question is always why. So we do not buy one sight unseen, we ask for the trade appraisal the other store wrote, and if they cannot produce it we walk. Nineteen of the last hundred.

19of the last 100

04

Bought off lease

We buy these when the record is clean

A three year lease ends, the car goes back to the franchise store, and the store sells it on. These are usually low mileage and usually one owner, and they usually carry a documented service history because the lease required it.

They are also the most expensive cars we buy, so there are only seven of them in the last hundred. If you are looking for a late model car with a short history and you do not mind paying for it, this is the one to ask about. If you want the cheapest sound car on the lot, it is not.

7of the last 100

05

Auction lanes, rental disposals, insurance and flood sales

We do not buy these

This is the channel most independent lots live on, and there is no shame in saying so, because it is fast and cheap and it is how you fill forty spaces in a week. A car crosses a block in under a minute, you bid on a description and a photograph, and you find out what you bought when it arrives on the truck.

We do not do it. Not the rental defleets, not the fleet lease returns from a national account, and not the salvage and water damage sales, which are where a car with a rebuilt title or a bad flood history gets back into circulation looking clean. Zero of our last hundred came from a sale of any kind, and if that ever changes we will change this number rather than delete this section.

0of the last 100

What we look at before the money moves

Knowing where a car came from narrows the risk. It does not remove it. Four things get checked on every vehicle before we buy it, and the same four get checked again before it goes out front.

  1. Water

    Carpet lifted at all four corners and the spare well opened. Silt in the spare well and corrosion on the seat rail bolts are the two tells that survive a good detail. A car that has been under water dries out and then fails electrically eighteen months later, which is long after the sale.

  2. The life it had

    A rental spends three years being driven hard by people who will never see it again, and it very often looks better than a privately owned car of the same age because it was washed weekly. We read the ownership count and the registration state history, not just the accident line.

  3. The underside

    Every car goes on the lift. Frame rails, subframe mounts, floor pan seams, exhaust hangers, brake and fuel lines. Northwest Missouri salts its roads, and rust is the reason we turn down more cars than any mechanical fault.

  4. The paperwork

    The title in hand before the car is advertised, the odometer statement matching the dash, and the history report printed. If the seller cannot produce the title, we do not buy the car and we do not take a deposit against one arriving.

A used estate car raised high on a two-post lift in a small garage bay, its rusted exhaust, rear axle and floor pan fully exposed, with a mechanic standing underneath shining a work light up onto the underbody.
Every car goes up before we buy it, and again before it is priced. You are welcome to stand under yours.

Before you drive out here

We are thirty-four miles north of the river and there is nothing else in Lathrop that will fill your afternoon. That is our problem to solve, not yours, so read this part before you get in the car.

From Kansas City, north of the river
About 40 minutes up Interstate 35.
From Liberty or Kearney
About 25 minutes.
From Cameron or Excelsior Springs
About 20 minutes.
On the lot this morning
19 vehicles, and that is all of them.

Call first and we will talk you out of it

If you name the car you saw and it has a problem you would care about, we will say so on the phone. If it sold on Saturday we will tell you that instead of letting you find out in the gravel. If what you want is not here, we will tell you which week we expect something like it and we will not ask you for a deposit to hold a car that does not exist yet.

The person who answers is one of the four people who bought the car. There is no call centre and there is nobody here whose job is to get you through the door.

Call the lot (816) 555-0142

Four of the nineteen

Listed the way we think about them, which is where each one came from first and what it costs second.

Placeholder content. These four vehicles are invented for this design mockup. The years, mileages, prices and photographs are illustrative only, and no VIN is shown because none of these cars exist.

A clean silver compact crossover parked on a cracked concrete lot in front of a low cinderblock building, under a flat grey sky.

Bought out of a driveway

Bought from a retired schoolteacher in Plattsburg in April. Second owner. The service records were in a folder in the glovebox and that folder is at the counter now.

2017 Chevrolet Trax LS, all wheel drive

Mileage
96,400
Asking
$11,900
Owners
2
Report and VIN
At the counter
A white extended cab pickup truck with visible scuffs along the doors, parked on a gravel lot beside telephone poles and a bare tree line.

Traded in at this counter

Traded by a man who farms north of town and bought a newer truck from us the same afternoon. We serviced it here for eleven years before we owned it, so there is nothing about it we do not know. It is scuffed down both sides and we have not touched that.

2005 Ford Ranger XL SuperCab

Mileage
148,200
Asking
$6,900
Owners
1
Report and VIN
At the counter
A dark navy blue four-door sedan photographed from the front three-quarter angle on a gravel lot, with a chain link fence and a metal shed behind it.

Bought off lease

Came back to a franchise store in Saint Joseph at the end of one lease. We bought it off their books before it went to a sale, which is the only reason it is standing here and not in an auction lane.

2018 Toyota Corolla LE

Mileage
88,600
Asking
$14,200
Owners
1
Report and VIN
At the counter
A dark red compact hatchback about fifteen years old parked on a gravel lot, with a grain elevator standing in the distance behind it.

Traded with another dealer

A dealer trade from a store in Saint Joseph that did not want to retail anything this old. We drove up and put it on their lift before we agreed a number. The underside is dry and the rear beam is sound, which is the only reason we took it.

2010 Dodge Caliber SXT

Mileage
132,700
Asking
$5,400
Owners
3
Report and VIN
At the counter

Come and stand next to it

Nobody buys a used car off a page and nobody should. Everything above exists so that when you get here you already know the two things that matter, which are where this particular car came from and what we did to it. The rest of it is a walk around the gravel with the man who bought it.

Where we are

210 North Main Street
Lathrop, Missouri 64465

Hours

Tuesday to Friday, 9 to 6
Saturday, 9 to 3
Closed Sunday and Monday

Phone

(816) 555-0142