I was in a minor accident. I was stopped at a stop light. A lady behind pulled out to switch lanes except she didn’t pull out enough and rammed into me, rear driver side. The quarter panel needs to be replaced. Their insurance is paying but they are calling it total loss since repair costs a lot. I hate car shopping and would like to repair the car and keep it. Not sure what driving a salvage car entail. I don’t like the sound of it. What would you do?
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How much would it cost to buy a similar car, and how much is the repair estimate?
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This happened to one of my kids. Car parked in it’s off street spot behind his apt and was hit/totaled by the neighbor across the alley.
Fortunately, the guy left a note and was insured with a really good company who gave a pretty good settlement allowing my kid to purchase another vehicle. I believe one of the options was to take a lower settlement and keep said vehicle but I doubt the car would have been insurable ( even for just liability ). I would not keep a totaled vehicle. Believe me, this was a nice, well kept car that we had purchased new many years ago, had low mileage, no accidents, etc. I felt really bad for my kid but grateful the person left a note and had great insurance. And since it was parked and happened overnight, no injuries. Sometimes you have to look at the bright side and deal with it.
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Blue book value of the car is about $11,000. Repair about $6,000. The insurance will either pay me $11,000 and they take the possession of the car or if I keep the car, they’ll pay me $6,200 for me to do whatever I want with it. I can get it repaired and drive a salvage vehicle. I called my insurance company They would insure it for liability only not for collision.
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You can negotiate the $11k number. What would it take to make you whole? Include your time and trouble. Also be clear that if they up the pay out you’re willing to sign you won’t sue in the future - that’s worth something to them. I got $2500 on top of the value of the car when mine was totaled and in retrospect I could have negotiated for higher - they were obviously surprised that I took the offer right away.
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We were run into years ago & the insurance company deemed it a total loss. We purchased the vehicle from them as a salvage vehicle, but I don’t remember how that worked. We actually never did any repairs, because while one side of the van looked bad, it was structurally sound. Had we repaired it, there would have been issues involving the gas tank (thus the total loss decision) - so we just left it. It was S’s first vehicle, and he drove it until it needed mechanical repairs that didn’t make financial sense.
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In my experience, when body shops are providing estimates to insurance companies, they know what the insurance number is to total out a car and will stop their estimate around that number and send it off to avoid spending extra time on the estimate if they think it’s a total loss. So, while they say the repair is around $6000, there is no telling what else they may discover when they get in there to actually do the work. I just went through this with my own car last year. The body shop came close to the total loss number the insurance company was looking for but didn’t quite hit it and the insurance company approved the repair (which really surprised the body shop!), but it turns out there was a lot of damage beneath the surface that they hadn’t even looked at that added thousands to the repair and it ended up being totaled out anyways. The damage we couldn’t see initially would have actually made the car unsafe to drive and I’m sure would have been an enormous repair bill.
If this were my choice, I would negotiate for a higher amount and purchase another car for peace of mind. If your car was in good condition beforehand, you can use that to argue added value to ask them to up that number a bit.
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