Real Estate Corner: Used cars and old houses

I bought a used car a few years ago. It had low mileage, and I was told it had just one other owner before me. I took the dealership at their word, and didn’t ask much of anything else about it; it had a small ding on one of the back doors and a minuscule chip that had been plugged in the windshield. Overall it seemed like a great car, and for a while it was.

After a couple of years of driving it, it started to have a recurring issue with one of the headlights. Sometimes it would go out, only to go back on for a few months, then back out again. I finally changed the bulb, but it kept happening until eventually it went out completely. After an appointment with my mechanic, he told me some surprising news: I needed an entirely new headlight, and the one that was in there wasn’t even the car’s original headlight, nor was it the correct model for my car, which is why it wasn’t working correctly for all that time. I was totally stunned and confused by this, and I didn’t understand why the headlight wasn’t the original. He informed me, somewhat matter-of-factly, that the car had probably been in an accident at some point.