Buying a Car in California, bay area

I have been working on this lately, trusts me its tough specially when you are come all way from India and driving a Maruti Suzuki Swift. Here you will find cars much bigger. Cars considered to be pretty good in India are the compact ones here... Strange but true...

you would say a corolla, accent, civic will do just fine for me but you may be wrong once you see people around driving this big cars.. Not to mention all the German cars - the biggies BMW, Mercedez

--Tools you should have--

Apps for CraigList, Cars.com, Edmunds.com, KBB, AutoTrader

Below are the things that i am doing right now

1) Looking through Craiglist for people Moving Out (If you plan to buy from Private owner)

• this gets you good cars as the selling intent is quite clear, pretty cheap sometimes and fairly new with low miles 
• Search/Look for cars which have NOT more than 15k miles per year  
•  keyword "moving" should be good enough in your craiglist search under cars and truck category
•  Japanese cars (toyota, honda, nissan) have longer lives, can be good after 100k if driven nicely 
• German cars are good too, but on the luxury and costly side + if if there is an issue the cost of repair is also high
•  American Cars - case by case is what i can say :-)

2) make sure you do the following checks in general on yourself

• the more cars you see the better you become at this checks 
• found this article great: http://www.wikihow.com/Check-out-a-Used-Car-Before-Buying-It 
• the reason is i sold my car in India and the person who bought it from me did 15 of those checks

3) Downloads apps - AutoTrader, Cars.com, KBB, Edmunds

4) Understand what is KBB value

5) Understand the Car Fax report, VIN

-- make sure the VIN you see on the car you see and the VIN thats on the CarFax match (specially in case of private dealers and owners, you may trust the Big dealers but still a good check to do)

6) Remember if the CAR fax report says no accidents reported it does not meant the car did not have any issues,

- its just that they were not reported, it might be a local mechanic did the repair

7) Talk to your colleagues, ask them their taste, thinking - trust me you will discover more

- show them the cars you liked, car fax report, get their opinions

8) Buying a leased returned vehicle or corporate user vehicle might be a good idea but do cross check with someone

9) Use Edmunds tools to notify all the dealers about the cars you want and your taste

- this way you will have more visibility and lots of inventory + you will have more people who will be searching for you.

10) Drive the car

• freeway, street 
• see the brakes, apply them and see if there is no delay 
• check if the tyres need to be changed 
• if you leave the steering, does the car go straight or in diff direction, there might be problem with the alignment

11) Remember a good amount of bargain happens more than 1000$

12) before bargaining try to go through all kinds of warranties available and see what can you get and try to get the full cost and then bargain

13) Take someone who has nice knowledge of cars with you or good at bargaining (local will be preferred)

14) Show the car to a 3rd party mechanic to get his deal, its fine to spend 50-100 $ on the mechanic, do not say anything to him, just say i want to do a 48 point check

15) SMOG tests should be clean for private owned cars 

16) Presently i am preferring cars which have driven less than 13-15k miles per year

• In India when i owned the vehicle i only added 2000kms in 2 years 
• so depends on your usage, i am pretty sure in my case the car will be mostly used on weekend

17) The one thing that i am consistently hearing is to buy it from a Car Dealer (basically from the showroom dealer) as he will be much more trust worthy and can be held responsible
18) Yelp ratings of this dealers will be a good idea, even you can do the same for mechanics
19) Do not forget to ask the big dealers for a ride. ( tell them you are new to the country and do not have a car and will prefer a pick-up and drop )

--finalizing the car price--

• Mechanic report - excellent, V. good, good, fair
• KBB fair value
• Also talk to the insurance guys, they will be able to tell you the price ( in a bit diff way ) when you plan to allocate say 50000$ for your CAR in case the 3rd party is UnInsured, they will mention your vehicle is worth x $ and they cannot offer more than that. [ this will give you the market price of your vehicle as per Insurance companies
• Make sure you workout Car Sale price in the sale agreement to pay less Sales Tax
• Between the Car Title will also list the amount paid by the owner to DMV for registration of Car, this can be used to find the price for the year it was bought

More learning's will be added as i learn more, btw i like the Nissan Ultima, lets see what i end up with...
Btw - I ended up buying an Used Car, 2000 VW Passat