Buying a used car can be scairy.

Especially if, like most people nowadays, you don't know a lot about cars. You can just take a test drive and hope for the best, but that can be a waste of your money and a financial disaster. That's where car inspectors come in.

It used to be you could take that used car you've been looking at to your local garage. Then Detroit put more and more computers in new cars so that only their dealer could hook up to it.

You could trust one of the big chain tire and repair outfits to find things wrong in a vehicle inspection but the problem is they don't always use the best mechanics and may have no interest in doing alow-profit vehicle inspection. So what to do?

A new breed has come into the picture now. Independent inspectors who don't do anything else. You hire them so they are not beholden to the car dealer who just wants to sell you the car. Their reputation can make or break them, so they tend to care a lot more about telling you the truth about that shiny sportscar or minivan that you are thinking about plunking down a couple months' wages to buy.

Best of all, many of them will go to the dealer so you don't even need to test drive the car. That's good for you, frankly, because many car dealers badly want you behind the wheel on a test drive because your emotion pushes logic aside when you smell that new leather (even if it did come out of a can about an hour before you showed up).

These guys (and gals) may be your answer to avoiding a lemon used car. A mobile used car inspection can be done pretty quickly and pretty cheap. For a hundred bucks or so, you can learn the truth about a car or truck or van and maybe save yourself thousands of dollars in unexpected repairs, to say nothing for hearing those four words that every man who thinks he is mechanically inclined hates with a passion --- "I told you so."

We're going to put up a list of inspectors here in a few days, telling you names and contact info for independent used vehicle inspectors who can help you stay away from someone else's used lemon, so stay tuned.