Inspectors’ Course

Hi there. It is very hot in Japan although the rainy season is not yet over. It is already hot like midsummer and on the TV news we have some old people as well as boys who were playing baseball who fainted and were carried to hospital because of the heat. In this incredibly hot weather, I had to go to an all-day course this morning to renew my inspector’s licence. The inspector’s licence is a certified qualification established by the Japan Auto Appraisal Institute (JAAI), an extra-departmental body of the Land, Infrastructure and Transportation Ministry that is responsible for the role of precise used car valuation, for the protection of the customers and keeping good order in the used car market. It is valid for 3 years and needs to be renewed every 3 years. This is the third year with my current licence.

The course was held in a building in the Yoyogi Park in Tokyo. Being originally built as the quarters for the foreign athletes when the Tokyo Olympics were held in 1964, it has been renovated to become the institute promoting international relationship and sport. The building is magnificent but, boy!; it is too far! It took more than 15 minutes on foot from the nearest train station. I just made it, sweating like a pig. It was like exercising in a sauna!

The lecture was mainly on the judgement standard of the cars with repair history. To decide the value of a used car, whether it was involved in an accident or not can change the value of the car greatly; so they lectured us in detail how to spot repaired parts with different examples.

In the lecture, the thing which stuck out in my mind was the fact that looking for the repair history on the latest model cars you have to use different approachs from standard frame-structured ones because the newer ones are a single-shell construction called “monocoque body”. A car with a monocoque body is an egg shaped and some models do not have a radiator core support nor inside panels. This is considered an excellent shape because, although without a frame, it can disperse the shock in a rear-end collision; keeping stiffness, a monocoque body car is light weight and because you can make the floor lower than usual cars you can have more room inside as a result. Although monocoque body cars can demonstrate their true abilities in collision, they do have some disadvantages, too. A minor dent on the bumper can be worse if you check inside: there is bigger damage that you cannot imagine just looking from outside, such as a huge bend in the side-bumper might be hidden underneath. This is because a monocoque car has a structure in which the whole body absorbs the shock of accident, the damage cannot be localised to the outside. Also, once a monocoque body car is involved in an accident, it loses its stiffness and strength dramatically; you have to be more careful buying these cars than buying standard frame-structured cars.

We do see a lot of repaired cars everyday but when we attend a course like this, we feel refreshed and think that we should use this knowledge from tomorrow.

Deciding the value of used cars, up to around 10 years ago was the valuation from the inspectors. This was the standard way to value cars in the market. However, lately, the market price at auction has become the trade price between the dealers; and some dealers decide their purchase from car owners after checking the auction price. So, most dealers now do not use the valuation done by the inspectors. The only case I can think of is when a maker/dealer buys a customer’s old car as a trade-in when he/she buys a new one: they use the valuation given by an inspector to show the customer. When the price is decided this way, the dealer then had to take their portion before giving the price to the customer, so it is usually lower than auction price; but because it is done by an inspector from JAAI, customers will trust them and this makes the trade easier.

We, at JPC, do not use JAAI’s standards but considering that at auction the standards are based on the JAAI’s rules, these rules are not irrelevant and we should know about them as basic knowledge in our industry.


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(Editor)
JPC TRADE CO.,LTD.
Kato building 4F, 1-1-2 Furuishiba, Koto-ku, Tokyo
Japan Used Motor Vehicle Exporters Association (JUMVEA)
TEL : +81-3-5245-7731
FAX : +81-3-3643-4955