If you do not cross state lines, will an insurance company write a collision policy on a car another insurer in that state had written off as “Totaled”?
It is my understanding that the problems with Salvage titles is the unavailability of “hull damage” insurance - because the vehicle had been “totaled”.
I’m driving a 20 year old beater mini-pickup*. When it dies, I will check out the local salvage shops - it seems that CA will “total” pretty much anything with the airbags deployed.
Now that everything is either welded or glued, I have no idea what it takes to replace a grill, hood, and left fender (including the headlight).
Apparently several people do know how to do these things and flip late-model fender-benders with deployed airbags. I don’t care what it looks like, but I do want it to last at least 10 years.
This means I’m not worried about hull damage insurance - just liability.
1997 was the last year Nissan made the small body pickup. Toyota stopped in 1995. I wanted a small truck with a 4 cyl/stick -and when they “supersized” the pick-up into what became the SUV, I didn’t expect a 4 banger would carry the extra weight.
Not quite the answer to your question, but State Farm will write a collision policy on a vehicle that State Farm itself wrote off as totaled. Once the state was convinced to issue a rebuilt salvage title, the insurer was perfectly happy to write full coverage on it again.
That particular vehicle, though, was a heavy pickup that didn’t have airbags in the first place. I don’t know as I’d want to be running around in something that was designed to have airbags and didn’t anymore.
Airbag deployment does not automatically render a vehicle “totaled”, but because of the high cost to replace they can quickly change the cost/benefit analysis.
Airbags are not only expensive in and of themselves, but they can also do a lot of collateral damage when they deploy.
Spoke to My BIL and I had the story a bit wrong. The insurance company (which was the other driver’s liability insurance, not my BIL/SIL’s comprehensive) did pay for the damage, but not as much as they would have paid had it not been a salvage title. Meaning, they declared the car a “total loss” and paid the entire value of the car, but they reduced the value of the car due to the salvage title. (My BIL said he hadn’t paid attention to the title when he got the car and had been unaware of this.)
On rereading the OP, I see there may have been confusing over the words “that car” in the sentence. It referred to the other driver’s car, not to my wife’s. Apologies for any confusion.
I think any frame damage has to be minor. I didn’t see any, and I drove the car around for over a week before bringing it in for repair. The place I brought it to is one of these real professional places that crosses all the t’s etc. (Had I known the car was going to be totaled I would probably have brought it to a cut-rate repair place, and kept the change.)