If you are buying a used car right now, you’ll come across some terms sellers use to attract buyers. An example is ‘baked on first body’. So, what does this mean? We’ll find out. You’ll get to know both the meaning of first body and baked on so that when a dealer or any private seller uses these terms, they shouldn’t sound strange to you.
What Does Baked on First Body Mean?
Let’s start with first body. A first body on a car means that it hasn’t had an accident and the body has never been worked on by an expert like a panelbeater. That simply means that a first body car has never undergone panel beating, and also, has not been painted since it arrived from the manufacturer.
As for ‘baked’, it’s another way of saying oven baked temperature, which is a method of painting a car. In an oven bake system, the paint is applied on the car in a dust-free environment and it uses oven temperature (160-175F) that dries the paint instantly and prevents drips caused by the application of multi-coats of paint on a car. It takes about 20-30 minutes to oven bake a car, which is much faster than waiting 12 to 16 hours for full cure.
Therefore, baked on first body means that the body of an advertised used car has never undergone changes external to the factory work such as panel beating but that it has been painted using low oven baked temperatures.
Is It Even Possible that a Nigerian Used or Even Toks is Still First Body?
Well, it’s possible but most cars you find at tokunbo stands are accidented and repaired. Some are even salvage cars that have been rebuilt and shipped down here for resale. But you can hardly tell!
A lot of Nigerian car dealers buy these cars through auction sales abroad at cheap prices, repair and then sell them as non accidented tokunbo vehicles.
You can only tell if a car is accidented or salvage if you run a Carfax report, which is something dealers won’t tell you. For a full Carfax report, you have to pay about $45. It will reveal most, if not everything, you need to know about a car. Whether it’s first body, baked on, or a non accident car, this vehicle history report will reveal it to you.
So, What’s the Big Deal with a First Body Car?
The reason a first body car is much more expensive is that the previous owners who have to repaint or rework the body will not be willing to pay a premium for factory paint jobs.
Many tokunbo cars you find have been repainted to factory standards, and then referred to as first body. You won’t know this unless you read the Carfax report of the car.
The situation is different with a Nigerian used car because most Nigerian owners would rather use a cheap paint option than pay almost the equivalent of the car for a paint job. It’s simply not economic, especially for someone who just wants to sell the car and upgrade to another one.
This is why a lot of Nigerian used or secondhand are second body with cheap shiny paint that peel off, fades quickly, or easily scratches in a short time.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get a quality paint job in Nigeria. You can, and a lot of dealers do this and sell the car as first body for more money. They simply autobake and sell it off as firsthand tokunbo without buyers asking questions.
But when it’s a Nigerian used, the first question will be is it first body?
A first body is a big deal because any car owner would prefer a car with accurate body work from the manufacturer instead of some shoddy filled jobs that only increases the market value of a car but won’t last.
Conclusion
Expect that some of the car listings you see online or offline in your neighborhood may have been poorly filled for aesthetics to sell the car without quality in mind. Careless sellers use filler to hide rust and dents, and they apply as much as 1 inch of filler.
As a buyer, not all the cars you see are baked on first body, including the toks that arrived in a container. It’s also unrealistic to offer as low as 500k to 2 million naira for a used car with high mileage and expect a first body.
Also, a car that is oven baked doesn’t automatically make the paint job excellent. Some were poorly made under a branch of a tree by an apprentice.
