Does it seem that insurance companies are quick to classify a vehicle as a total loss after an accident? I always thought they tried to repair a car or truck, but as I talk with more people, it seems totals are becoming the norm.
Here’s how the insurance companies figure:
If the blue book value of a car is less than what a typical repair shop would charge to fix it: the car is totaled.
That “totaling” is a shock may be due to nothing more than people’s natural tendency to think their car is worth more than it is, in conjunction with incredible costs to “repair” even minor damage.
Imagine a 1 inch nick to a bumper costing $600 to fix. I have personal experience with this.
Is it a racket? Probably. Overpaid mechanics. Materials purchased from middle men. But you don’t pay the insurance company to right social wrongs, just to get your car fixed. So they pay. And you pay.
partly_warmer is spot on with his description of how totalling works. It may be more common these days than in the past because of the new automobile designs.
Years ago, cars often had very stiff construction that helped to prevent damage from spreading from one part of the car to another. More recent vintages are designed with crumple zones to have the car absorb the damage, rather than the passengers. Today’s cars, therefore, tend to wind up more damaged in a crash than older (80’s?) cars.
The cost to repair that damage hasn’t gone down, it’s still a very labor intensive, detail oriented, skilled job. So, we have more damage on average, so you get more jobs totalled than in the old days.
Cheesesteak is right on spot with the comments about the crumple zones, which are actually a safety feature. The crumple zones are designed to absorb the shock of the impact to prevent that energy from being transfer to the passengers of the vehicle. Another side effect is that in most cases the frame has not been damaged, but just the skin.
It has created quite a boom in the salvage yard market. I have an acquaintance who owns a salvage yard. He buys many totaled cars from insurance companies. Another guy we both know “salvages” the parts from the various wrecks to create cars that in most cases are as good as if they hadn’t been in a wreck.
These Frankenstein cars then enter the Used Car market (clearly indicated with a “Salvaged Title”) at a significant amount less than what a non-salvaged identical model would be.
Slight hijack.
What Cheesesteak has posted is no lie. I was backing out of my driveway in my 1980 Ford Granada a while back, when some joker in a 1993 Honda Accord barreled into the back of me. The other guy was going about 45 mph in a 20-mph residential zone.
His left front bumper collided headlong into my rear right bumper. My car sustained some black smudges on the bumper – not even a dent or a warp.
The Accord driver lost his entire front bumper and front left fender, and IIRC, his wheel well was damaged, too. It all just flew apart.
I ran into an interesting twist on this seemingly straightforward calculation. Last year, I hit a deer while I was going highway speeds on an interstate. It destroyed the front right roof column, along with everything connected to it. So I needed a new roof, windshield, door, etc.
So the Allstate inspector comes out, writes it up as around $5000 to repair, which was below the totalling threshhold (the car was probably worth around $9000). While the autobody shop was fixing it, they submitted several supplemental claims for interior damage - including a completely new dash. Allstate paid the supplemental claims, which added up to around $3000.
So the final result was that the car would have been totalled if the inspector had done a better job. Which ticks me off, since I wanted it to be totalled (this was the second accident that did more than $5k of damage).
[Howard Johnson] Homebrew is right about Cheesesteak being right about partly_warmer being right. [/Howard Johnson] D
I had a fender bender, hit the crumple zone, and the insurance company tried to write off my car. I had just bought the car two months earlier for $6000. I couldn’t get a replacement anywhere for less than $8000 (I really did get a good deal on my car), but the insurance company insisted it was only worth $4000, which made the accident a write-off.
It took three months of arguing to get them to fix it.
I’ve been an adjuster for 10 years now and it’s been about 5 since I dealt with an auto accident, but I still remember the math. A car is totaled when the damage plus it’s value as salvage exceeds the market value of the vehicle.
Thus $14,500 in damge to a $18,000 vehicle which has $4000 in salvage value is totaled. This may very from state to state. Some states require that a vehicle be totaled when the cost to repair exceeds 75% of the vehicles value. In those states the orginal title is destoryed and the car must be sold for parts. It can (or at least should) never be repaired and retitled.
Car construction has changed in several major ways from the cars built upto the early 70’s. Crush zones and crumple zones are the result of “Unibody” construction. This means that there are no frame rails. If you look under a midsize pickup truck or better, you’ll find two metal rails that the chassy is set on. These do not ususally exist in today’s passeger cars. It’s cheeper to build this way in terms of raw materials.
Body pannels are thinner if they’re made of metal at all so vehicles are easier to damage.
Finnally, thanks to efforts from the auto industry the standard car bumper must only be able to survive undamage from a 4 mph accdent, as appossed to 10 mph of earlier years. This makes cars cheeper to build, again in raw materials and more effecient as they are lighter. But also easier to damage.
So cars are more cheeply built, designed to crumble and have low impact bumpers. Totalling a car is more likely these days that it was even 10 years ago
another part of the equation is the body shops and how they estimate. they grab the big book with flat rates (which is “standard” in the industry, so it is also what the insurance adjusters work with) and whip up a whopping estimate of, say $5000 to repair the car. (this is “legit”. the flat rates represent how long a job takes to do to figure labor rates. unfortunatly, in real life, a brain-damaged sea-sponge works faster than the flat rate speed) the adjuster agrees with the body shop estimate and car is totaled. then the body shop submits a bid to buy the car for salvage for $X dollars, repairs the car for an actual cost of $2500, then sells the car for a profit (real life figures are different, but there is money to be made in totaling cars “premature”)
wanna fix the system? easy! improve your driving skill and cut back on accidents. real simple solution. you can never eliminate them, but reducing stupid $2000 fenderbenders would be a great start…
(or drive 1965 fords- not unlike Buddy Lee, can’t bust em’!)
In my case, some asshole slammed into the back of my vehicle at a high rate of speed & then sped off. There was no way out w/vehicles on the left, right & immediately in front. Ins. adjuster indicated the other party may have been using alcohol because they never slammed on their brakes.
I didn’t me “you violet”, i meant “you as in the general population who seems to think the operation of a motor vehicle is trivial and not at all a matter of life-or-death and can talk on the phone, read the paper, apply make-up, have no concept of vehicle control, etc etc etc…”
no offense, vi 
Where the hell are my car keys?
I totally agree with you, gatopescado (fished cat?). Recently a woman blew a stop sign & almost hit me. I caught up to her right & noticed she was holding a paper plate and eating while driving!! Was going to take her lic. plate & report it, but would that be worth the effort? 