BUYING
The lane spells transmission seven ways.
A buyer spends ten minutes on a car and finds the one line in the condition report that kills it. Multiply by forty cars a sale day. A filter that reads the announcements and the mechanical section first gives those hours back, if it reads them the way Manheim writes them.
How Manheim writes an announcement
Announcements are free text. The same disclosure appears as "ENG PROBLEM", "ENGINE NOISE", "CEL ON", "CHECK ENG LIGHT", "TRANS SLIP", "TRANSMISSION ISSUE" and, on one car that reached a live demo in October, "TRANSMISSS" with an extra S. Manheim also glues the light words onto the disclosure, so the text reads "GREEN LIGHT/ENG PROBLEM" and the row repeats it as "Green Light Yellow Light GREEN LIGHT/ENG PROBLEM". A filter that looks for the exact phrase "transmission" misses most of them.
The kill list
A working filter is a set of patterns, not words. It treats these as hard excludes, in any spelling or abbreviation: engine problem, engine noise, check engine, light codes and confirmed codes, transmission slip or problem, drivetrain, powertrain, misfire, head gasket, coolant, turbo, oil leak, true mileage unknown, not actual mileage, odometer discrepancy. It reads the structured title-branding field separately, because salvage, rebuilt, flood, lemon, buyback and theft recovery hide there, not in the announcement text. And it reads the condition report's Mechanical and Diagnostic section, because "Confirmed Codes" on a 2020 RS5 lived only there, invisible on the listing row.
What is not a kill
Open recalls, auction guarantees, third-party seller lines, pickup logistics, "in 48 hrs", prior Canadian, flat buy fees and transport assists carry no condition information. A filter that kills on "has any announcement" throws away clean cars by the thousand; on one 24,000-car run that mistake would have removed 6,000 cars and kept the ones with nothing disclosed. An empty announcement array means nothing was disclosed, and the car stays in.
Green and yellow in the same line
Rows routinely carry both strings. Testing green first reported a yellow-light Acadia as green on one store's list. The rule is to test yellow first: when both appear, the caution is the truth. Frame and structural words are their own class: not a kill, because some stores shop frame cars with a clean history, but never tier one.
The misspelling that got through
On a demo in October a 2021 SUV with "TRANSMISSS" in the announcement reached the clean list because the pattern expected "transmis" followed by the usual letters and the extra S broke the match. It was caught on screen, the pattern was widened the same day, and the car was gone from every store's list by the next run. That is the real work of a filter: it is never finished, and every miss should cost one afternoon, not one car.
A run list with the mechanical and storied cars already gone, the yellow lights labeled yellow even when the row also says green, frame cars in their own tier, and the ten minutes per car back in the day.
Questions dealers ask
Does the filter remove cars with any announcement at all?
No. Recalls, guarantees, seller type and logistics lines are stripped before the test. Only mechanical, light-code and storied-title patterns exclude a car.
What about frame damage?
Frame and structural announcements, and severe damage lines in the condition report, move a car to its own tier instead of removing it. Stores that buy frame cars with a clean history can turn that tier on.
How often is the kill list updated?
Every time a miss is found on a live list, the same day. The list is one shared source of truth used by the Pre-Sale Buy List, the OVE Buy Agent and Auction Search.
DEALERCORTEX AI