Should I be wary of buying a car that is from MN. or WI? I'm looking at 2019 XT5's from those states.
I've been looking for a 2020 xt5 sport for two months. I started with a 2020 xt5 build and price. By studying that. I determined what options were important to us and then looked for a used model with our choice of color and interior color. I reviewed Autotrader, Cars.com, CarMax, Edmunds,a couple of others. The most success we had was with Autolist.com. I put the distance to look as nationwide. After some time, I wondered why some areas of country weren't represented, so I used a middle or southern US zip code. That helped a lot. Since I wanted a sport model, there are fewer of them. Now, I didn't want mileage over 25k and found most under 15k, mostly because cover restricted the amount of traveling that was done then. Majority of these cars are from leases. Also wanted one owner, no accidents.
No to your question... I'm from PA. and am quite familiar with salt and rust. I wanted a car from south or west. While sorting out several choices, I started checking out their Carfaxes. They, along with service info, list original location where car was shipped from factory. And if buyer stayed there or another location. One thing I discovered studying these, is that after lease is over, many dealers send the cars to an auto auction, not because of problems, but their marketing operations, such as they want to lease new ones, but not sell used ones, whatever. Ok then I discovered many Salt state cars ended up being bought by non salt state dealers, so take that into consideration. A 2020 might be ok if it was washed regularly and driven in a significant amount of rain in spring to remove most of the salt, you maybe fine.
One thing I would recommend is to have the chassis sprayed down thoroughly with a product called SALT-X. It is used a lot at saltwater marinas to neutralize salt residue. Comes in gallon jugs and makes 30 gallons of mix. Looks like the color of blue washer solvent.
We're from Pa. and are currently in Florida to pick up a 2020 XT5 Sport tomorrow that meets our requirements. Lesser than sport models are much more plentiful, so most likely no need to travel that far.
Oh, and we considered 2021 models, but due to the chip problem, some options are currently available till they get the chips, and some options gave a credit for it and won't be installed. Same with 22's also.
Sorry for being so long winded.