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I have bought countless cars in my time, but only dealt with three used car dealers along the way. While all three were very different people and I had different types of encounters, they all stand out as being very memorable at the same time.

My father had always warned me about used car dealers and to not let them draw you in, and I really should have listened to him when it came to the first guy I saw. He was very cocky and very arrogant and made it out like he was doing me a favor by selling me a car. I was 18 years old and working at a grocery store, and he got me into a financing plan that cost me so much of what I made each week that it was not really worth it.

On top of that, there was a problem with the car's transmission, and I had to bring it back in to have his mechanics look at it. After a week, I finally called him and asked about the status. He told me that I could come and pick it up and that the mechanic had done some “tinkering” with the transmission and it was running better. It was not, and I soon discovered that was the used car dealers way of saying you're on your own. I got rid of the car almost immediately.

There's something about buying a car online the people just don't grasp instinctively. How are you supposed to buy a car without being able to take test drive, they ask. Well, these days, you buy the way you buy a vacation to a place you've never been to before to stay at a resort you’ve never stayed at before – you depend on reviews.

Perhaps we are all used to the idea of a test drive because when have we ever had such a wealth of customer reviews and other data from multiple sources at our fingertips at all times? Well, about 10% of all car leases and sales in America are done sight unseen today. People just don’t worry that much anymore. They're far more interested in the convenience of buying a car online and having it over with.

We are at a point now where Internet businesses have more or less covered all the bases and really made it possible for you to not miss anything when you try to buy online. Right now, you get complete vehicle reports, all the expert reviews you want, you get prices paid on sales made in your ZIP code, and with Kelly Blue Book, Edmunds and other websites, you can even get quotes from a salesman without ever setting foot in a dealership. This is a welcome change. You no longer have to head off the salesman the home turf advantage.

The crisis in the economy didn't just make it difficult for people to find credit cards and mortgages for their needs. It made it difficult for them to find anyone willing to lease them a car, too. The whole car lease business received a real blow when in 2009, Chrysler filed for bankruptcy and its leasing subsidiary simply closed its doors. These days though, car leasing companies are beginning to pick up once again. Business is up 2%.

People tend to make a number of mistakes dealing with car leasing companies. These mistakes always raise prices for them. When you go to the dealership, usually, the salesman will start off by asking you if you're planning on releasing or buying. The mistake you make is that you tell the truth.

When you tell a salesman that you’re leasing, right away, he will completely refuse to lower prices at all. What you should do is to tell him that you're buying, negotiate the price, and then switch and say you’re leasing instead. You don't want to tell the salesman how much of a lease payment you can afford each month, either. When you do that, he has no reason to go below that level.

Three out of four for college students in America have a car right on campus. They may be dangerously close to being classified clunkers; but they are functioning cars. Parents don't like this, of course. They don't like sending their children on a whole new educational adventure for four years in college and letting them do it with poor quality transportation. They'd rather they had excellent reliability, reasonable fuel economy, and all the safety features money can buy. Parents looking for affordable cars for college students need to think about something in the $20,000 range.

On such a car, you can expect ABS, stability control, a half-dozen airbags, and something around 35 mpg. Apparently affordable cars for college students that include all of the above and more, aren't really high on the manufacturers' list of things to achieve with their product lineups. They don't produce many of these models. Let's take a look at a short list of the best affordable cars for college students – for great well-established options like the Corolla, that Civic and the Fit.

If you're looking for the cheapest car to run, you might find models like the Volkswagen Golf TDI to be great value for money. Where else do you get 40+ mpg in a car? You might also consider something like the Mini Cooper. It has enough character to last you for years.

Isn't it supposed to be a happy experience buying a new car? Well, happiness and joy aren't the feeling most people come away from the car dealership with, according to the surveys. Customers are fed up usually with how car salesmen always seem to be trying to get away with something.

But you can do whatever you can to protect your interests. The first thing to do is to never go in without having done all the research you need. You mustn't ever show up at the dealership looking for information. You need to have all of that in place even before you show up. The salesman, if heever should catch sight of the slightest chink in your armor, will make use of the opportunity to fill your head up with all kinds of self-serving ideas and information.

What you need when you buy a new car is to trust in the Kelley Blue Book or in Consumer Reports or Yahoo! Autos. You'll never find a better source of information at the dealership. Check to look at the invoice price for each car, and not the MSRP. The invoice price is a great piece of information – it shows you what the dealer paid to the manufacturer to get the car. When the dealer quotes you a price then, you know exactly what kind of profit margin he's working on, and how low you can go.

It's all you see these days – cyber crime. You can't charge your iPhone at some random public charging station because of the Juice Jacking (you think that's just a charging cable that they give you, but it's actually a data connection cable and they try to hack into your phone and steal your information); you can't apply for a scholarship because they have online scholarship scams, you can't even get government hurricane relief – there's an Irene disaster relief scam. And then this – buying a car online may not be such a great alternative anymore to rubbing shoulders with the sleazy used car salesmen because of fraud in online car sales.

That's what the FBI says in a national scam alert – online car sales are the latest area of operation for fraudsters. What they do is, they advertise that they have a car to sell you. It's been a fairly regular place that you see this advertisement – eBay Motors, Craigslist or some other place. What they do to really get your attention is, they advertise it far cheaper than you would expect for a car like that. They try to give you a (barely) plausible-sounding reason why it's so cheap – like they've been deployed overseas by the military or been transferred to another country on a regular job or something.

To most people, when a car’s engine dies, there is practically nowhere to go from there - other than a car dealership. Often when they do this, they don’t realize that they're giving up on what is otherwise a perfectly functional machine that just needs a new engine. While that might seem like a huge replacement to make in a car, it's not a very expensive one. There are all kinds of online businesses out there that deal in used engines.

If you have a car that seems to have given up the ghost but it's a car that you love for how well it used to run, looking at used replacement engines may be where you need to turn your attention.

Of course, you need to know what you doing when you're buying anything used. When it comes to complex systems like engines - especially ones which you are completely unfamiliar with - it can be a minefield, going out shopping. There are all kinds of online companies out there that try to take advantage of you and your unfamiliarity with used engines.

Everyone knows that cars make a terrible investment; in fact, as a way to lose money, cars might stand second only to expensive clothes and electronics. At least, that's how conventional wisdom goes; anyone knows for instance, that the moment you drive a car off the dealership, you lose 10% right there. For a couple of years now though, the market has gone through a kind of weird transformation. Today, not only does a car not lose value when you drive it off the lot, it actually gains in value. Buy a new Prius today or another fuel-efficient car, and you could well drive it for a full year and sell it for more than you bought it for at the end of the period. It's like you get a free car every year. Certainly, gas prices have fallen from the $5 peaks they were on not long ago; but the way gas has plateaued at about $4 for months, Americans seem to have found a permanent preference for gas sippers over gas guzzlers. As more Americans choose used hybrids, demand has been pushed so high, selling used cars has never been a more profitable activity.

But it isn't just used hybrids that are in demand these days. Selling used cars in general, tends to be quite a profitable activity these days – there are three-year-old compact cars there seeing a resurgence on the used car market, selling at a third more than they used to just a couple of months ago. A 2008 Honda Civic LX will fetch you $1800 more today than it would have been just six months ago. A Ford focus of similar vintage will get you 70% of what you would have paid for it back then.

You'd think that people would be unhappy when they got to the point that their car broke down or was found unserviceable. On the contrary, there's a sneaking part in them that is happy usually – that they get to buy a new car. Well, as exciting as all of this is undoubtedly, it can quickly turn tragic if you aren't really careful. And these days, now that people are learning to become comfortable with the idea that they can buy a car online sight unseen, things can really get out of hand if you aren't careful.

When you buy a car online, basically, you have to go forward resigning yourself to the fact that there's nowhere to turn to if things go wrong. You need to go in with your eyes open because there is nothing you can do if things don't go according to plan.