Hey all, need help thinking about my car situation, I’ll try to make a long story as short as possible: I bought a 2017 Camry from a Toyota dealer in 2020 for 14.3k, and it had about 23k miles on it. After tax, interest and registration fees, it was about $16.1K They gave me a $600 dollar discount from the original price, because the car was poorly repaired from a previous accident. The car was previously hit on the passenger side, and the door sleeves were poorly applied. The doors were slightly bent around the edges. I thought that was OK because wasn’t noticeable until you pointed it out. In hindsight it was a bad decision to buy the car.

Later rust started to form on both doors where the repairs were done. The repairs were a lot worse than I realized. I was told my several body shops that the only way to surely fix the car was to replace most of the components of both doors as they were probably defective and rusting on the inside. The quotes I got were between 3.5k-4k. I have a friend who does body work and he offered to do it for 2k. They couldn’t believe that Toyota dealer would put the car on the market in the way it was repaired, and I complained. After an ordeal, the dealership finally to my surprise offered to buy the car back or trade in for a value of 13,500 after I put nearly 24k miles on it.

Normally, I would consider that a great deal, but given how overpriced the used car market is, it’s harder to gauge the value properly. I’m not sure whether it would be cheaper to just repair the car. So I’d like to hear any insight from those who are more familiar than me with the market right now, what’s my most cost effective option? Repair or trade in? Thanks.