Three Things To Keep Top Of Mind
The overall auction grade is the auction inspector’s assessment of the overall quality of the car. You can usually find it written in the top right corner of most auction inspection reports.
However, before we get into the details about all these different grades and what each one means, there are three things that need to be emphasized about overall auction grades:
- They are subjective with different inspectors and different auctions more or less strict.
- The details the inspector writes about the car are much more important.
- Thy are broad categories covering a range of levels of quality.
Put simply, a grade 3.5 at one auction may not be as good as a grade 3.5 at another auction, but may be better than the same grade at a third auction. So anyone who tells you they have a great grade 4 you should bid on is not giving you the whole story — make sure you get a translation of what is written on the auction sheet first.
At Drift & Drive, we think the overall auction grade is useful for one thing and one thing only, and that is to narrow down the number of vehicles you will consider bidding on: Rather than trying to bid on all 247 Corollas, it means you just consider the 56 grade 4 Corollas.
It’s a tool to cut through the thousands of vehicles available in the car auctions in Japan to quickly find the ones you will actually be interested in bidding on.
So what are the major, overall Japanese auction grades?
With that said, let’s look at the different overall auction grades and what they mean about the overall condition of the car: