I had kind of a neat thing happen today. I just recently bought my Crossfire Limited Roadster from a local Chrysler/Jeep/Dodge dealer and while I was "dealing" on it, I found out that it had been traded in on a new car by a local owner. Since I knew the salesman at the dealership, I asked him if he could tell me who the previous owner was. As expected, he said that it was illegal to disclose that information, but since he was the one who took the car in on trade, he would contact the previous owner and see if that person would agree to receive an email from me to discuss the car. Well, he did that and I got the email address1
I then wrote to this person, introducing myself and then asking some things about the car. Boy, did I hit the jackpot. It turns out that this guy was the ORIGINAL owner of the car and had a ton of information about it. When he bought the car, he was "dreaming" about buying a new, 2007 Dodge Viper and went to the dealership to look at one. While there, he noticed 2 Chrysler Crossfires sitting there and thought they were interesting. He inquired about them and found that both of them had been on the lot for almost a year and were currently on sale for $10,000 off the MSRP! He tried one out and bought it the next day. He then used it as a local driver until last fall with absolutely NO problems except complaints about the cost of service/maintenance. He loved the car and really had to do some soul searching to trade it in on a new car.
The interesting part of this is that I did not know that Chrysler had such a tough time selling these cars when they were new. I thought they were fairly good selling cars. But $10K off the MSRP just to move them off lots? He also told me about every "event" he had with the car which basically was none...no accidents or maintenance problems, no sticky keys, no RCM problems, really not much of anything. What really got my attention was that he told me that he had just (2 weeks ago) cleaned out his files and threw away the original window sticker, sales contract, and all maintenance records for the car, thinking that he would never meet the new owner. What a bummer....I would have loved to have that documentation!
Anyway, in my experience, it is very unusual to actually be able to contact the previous owner, especially when that owner was the original owner. Now that I know him and have an open invitation to chat with him, I have really stumbled onto a valuable asset. Maybe this isn't all that rare given the relative newness of the car, but I was sure surprised to find this guy, and to find that this car has never had any mods made to it at all. It really is a pristine original!