How’s your ride treating you a year in? I’ve seen some salvages and reparied salvages for sale at steeply discounted prices. Some appear to come from body shop owners that have a backend car dealer for repaired and reconstructed. Now I’m cool with a mechanic and bodyshop bro who will come and inspect any car I want. However, the conventional stigma associated with salvage space has me a bit concerned. Back in the day I unknowingly had a repaired salvage (Caprice) which was a great deal and had no problems outside of maintenance. But this very well could have been the exception to the rule.
^ Don’t do it unless you can be 1000000% sure it’s salvage because of being totalled in a crash, not because of Hurricane Sandy. I’m no car expert, but my understanding is that a car that was underwater for days is almost impossible to really fix.
I’m sure he is ok. If there are problems with the frame or other parts of the car, he probably won’t notice any rust or other problems until much later.
It’s perfect. I had it fully checked out inclulding the frame and I read the police report (available online) before I bought it. There was one sensor in the electrical system I had to replace before I could smog it, total cost was around $300 including the part, which I bought on EBAY. I also had to retint one of the windows, which was about $50.
I strongly advise not buying a flood or fire ticket because you have no idea how bad the electrical systems are or will be. Most or maybe all states require the type of salvage to be listed on the ticket.
Overall, I bought a car that retailed for $40,000 several years ago for $8,500 (about $9,000 after repairs) and it had about 30,000 miles on it. I’ve put another 5,000 or so on it over the last 9 months with no issues. I found out where the car was auctioned and was able to call and troll someone over the phone to get the original salvage auction price. So I knew what the floor was that the repair guy paid for it and in Google cache I could see that the seller had lowered his price 3x already on the craigslist ad he had up. I called him and placed a bid slightly above the auction price + my estimate of parts, and he hit the bid because he just wanted to move on.
Salvage cars in general are 50/50 I think, you have to pick your shots carefully. I don’t know if I would do it again because it took me about a week to figure out how the used car market works, find the car, and go get it but it was fun and made sense at the time. Today I probably wouldn’t have the time.
There is some issue with resale value of salvage cars but I figure if I drive if for 5 years I got my money out of it anyway, and even then I could probably sell it for around cost or a bit lower because drift kids like to mod this car out. Just make sure you find a motivated seller and buy with margin of safety.
Never. Water or fire is a dealbreaker. I’m seeing some crash repairs that look nice and have an optimal miles+year+price going for them.
Like I said, I know a mechanic very well along with his friend who’s in the body shop business. Both of these guys will give it to me straight with whatever I want.
I personally love rear ended cars since that means less damage to the engine and less likely to have suffered significant frame damage.
I have bought 2 salvages cars so far. First one was problem free up until the day I totalled it. The second one gave me engine troubles (although it had nothing to do with the previous crash) and after I changed the motor it has been running like a champ.
Copart’s got decent service and they’ll hook you up with free local evaluators if you’re not local. I’ve found the bidding easier on “erepairables.com”…it’s an aggregator, even though copart has a large majority of the market. You’ll see copart cars on erepairables.
There are few dealers of unrepaired salvage cars - it’s often times the same group winning the auctions (for a given brand of car). Keep in mind if you’re buying at the auction stage they’re usually unrepaired and it’s on you to fix them - buying repaired salvaged cars is less centralized and pricing varies much more. Auction pricing is pretty consistent/transparent.
Pricing on unrepaired cars with good drivetrains go for a good premium over auction pricing (50-100% markup) - cars with bad drivetrains typically try to get resold for auction price, but can be found for less. Storage costs on duds is high.
I drove to Oregon from SF, it was a bit further than I wanted to go but I went up the coast and it was a nice trip.
Copart is ok but seems to be mainly wrecks that are really smashed up and the sales are as is – I wanted to buy something I knew would work. I talked to the guy I bought from over the phone and he seemed legit, and I paid to have him take it to the dealership and do a full inspection. Copart looked to be mainly smashed up cars that you would need to fix, which was not my goal. There are quite a few people that fix up Copart cars and then sell them, and that was my target seller.
I think there is a good business buying / fixing Copart cars if you know what you are doing and have the required skills but I don’t.
This was a lot better before access to auctions and online info became so prevalent - it’s still pretty good but takes real work. I used to bring in auction cars from Japan and part them out for ridiculous margins…then everyone started doing it, meh.
Yeah probably, all markets work like that. The stock market was a lot less efficient before the internet. You can still beat the market today but it’s harder and you need to have a real edge. Before you could basically just show up and buy low multiple stocks.