There is a lot to think of with a car transaction that goes beyond mechnical function. The basic four boxes of finance or leasing/trade-in/price/"extras" are a lot to keep in your head all at once when you only rarely buy a car. I ended up going to about 6 or 7 dealerships to get what I wanted at a good enough price taking into consideration the trade value on my truck and what they had in stock.
From my experience, not knowing anything about cars and what basic things to look for, forums seemed not that great and the “top 10 things to look for” kind of articles either.
I ended up asking chatGPT, and turns out it seems to know exactly about the model I was looking at and I then crossed check if the commons problems were real online.
Some used cars can appear “fine” on the surface, but once a mechanic looks under the hood (ie, under carriage inspection, checking for recalls, oil check).
A used car I found online in Ohio looked perfect but paid a mechanic to check it out. Turns out the under carriage was rotted to hell. Which is honestly typical for cars in the rust belt (ie, due to salt from roads)
Why would that be a problem? A manufacturer is obligated to fix an open recall at no cost to you.