What happens if an older car is in an accident, insurance-wise?

Factual Questions
1

Long story short, my mom’s car was hit, with witnesses, and it was 100% the other driver’s fault (Mom was parked, with her keys in her pocket - the other driver was just starting a road test, which, thankfully, she failed. And this means there are reliable witnesses).

Mom has a 2007 Prius with 130k miles that was not in great shape to begin with. I am seeing value estimates ranging from $1k - $4k resale value. If the adjuster sees any significant damage due to the accident, repairs are going to be a large chunk of the book value of the car.

At what point would the car be declared totaled, and what would happen next if it is? Honestly Mom needs a newer car anyway, so it might not be the worst thing in the world as long as it doesn’t leave her too much out of pocket.

(Complicating factor: Mom and the other driver have the same insurance company.)

2

If the cost to repair the damages is greater than the value of the car, it’s a total loss. She will get a check for the fair market value of the car before it was damaged.

3

You’re not going to get more than book value. Generally a car will be declared totaled if repair costs exceed that value. What happens at that point is the insurance company cuts you a cheque and takes possession of the car.

That said, sometimes negotiations can be fruitful. When my son was in an accident years ago, the damage to his car was pretty extensive and it looked very likely that it would be declared totaled. Which would have been extremely inconvenient since it was a very good car that had been well cared for and in practical terms was worth a lot more than book value to us.

My ex, who works in the biz and has contacts all over the auto industry, got the insurance adjuster together with an auto-body guy she knew. They made a deal, and presto, the repair was authorized. Everybody was happy – the auto-body shop got business out of it, the insurance company got a deal, and my son got his car back. When we went to pick up the car the body-shop owner showed me the work he had done. He replaced practically the entire front half of one side of the car, including installing a new door. Sometimes it amazes me that repairs like this are actually possible!

4

As a data point, my 2010 Honda Fit was sideswiped about six months ago. I went to a body shop recommended by Allstate, and they repaired the damage (mostly cosmetic) for over $6,000. Googling, that’s quite close to the Kelley Blue Book value.

5

It is pretty common for a car to be totaled if the cost of repairs exceeded around 70-80% of its value. The actual number depends on your state.

6

Thanks - it’s Illinois. I told Mom that she needed to talk to the claims adjuster (which is what her agent told her), and I guess we shall see. She replaced the battery a few years ago and the refurbished battery is almost at the end of its warranty.

7

When my 19 year old Saturn was the middle car in a sandwich ( I stopped abruptly because the Jeep in front of me stopped abruptly, the driver behind me did NOT stop fast enough), I made the logical assumption that a non-drivable 19 year old car would be totaled, borrowed a car from my Dad, and started car shopping the next day.

Bought a brand new car and drove it off the lot not quite a week later, and got the call from the insurance adjuster confirming that it was totalled a couple of hours later.

(I believe that my insurance company would have paid for a rental car for me starting that day, though there might have been hoops to jump through. Or the other driver’s insurance would have, once I had a police report. )

It took another week or so (maybe more) to get the check from the insurance company, and I was pleasantly surprised by how large it was (something like $3K).

That is probably an entirely unhelpful anecdote, but there you are. I think I talked to someone insurance related at some point that wanted to know whether any lights had broken-- apparently on a car the vintage mine was, the cost of replacing a head or taillight was a pretty good chunk of the value of the car.

8

A vehicle will be considered a total loss after an Illinois vehicle accident if the repair costs for the vehicle plus the scrap value exceed the fair market value of the vehicle before the incident occurred.

SOURCE

9

That should be a good thing. State Farm removes the deductibles if people cars are insured by them. I don’t know about other companies.

10

And now for the other side of the story …

A couple years ago I rear-ended somebody. Dumb distracted mistake on my part. They were substantially undamaged but my couple-year old very nice car was pretty well stove in and all the airbags had fired.

My insurance wanted to replace the cosmetic parts with Chinese knockoffs, and not dig into the mechanicals more than a glance. Which would have resulted in a fundamentally defective formerly nice car whose resale value would had been destroyed by the half-assed repairs. It took a few months of wrangling for my shop to dig ever deeper into the car finding everything that was damaged and documenting all the repairs required by the manufacturer’s repair manuals.

Nearly a year after the accident the insurance company gave up, totaled the car, and paid me off. Any other outcome would have been a total rip-off against me.

11

You can’t replace a bumper these days for $4K. Darn near any car past about 75K miles will be totaled the first time it’s hit.

You can assume she’ll get paid off, and that the amount you get will seem insulting compared to the price of a new car. Good luck with the sudden expense of car replacement. Shame that’s not an insurable risk.

12

I think the resolution of our competing anecdotes is that much of the outcome depends not just on the extent of damage (i.e.- cost of repair) but the kind of damage – how much was just cosmetic, and how much was structural. In your case the airbags going off is a pretty big red flag both of the force of the impact and the cost of replacing the damn things.

I’m pretty sure you got the best outcome in your case. I’m also pretty sure we did in ours, too. It’s my son’s car, not mine, so I don’t drive it a lot, but I’ve driven it on short trips a few times and it looks and drives like new. There’s no way we could have bought such a car with the proceeds of an insurance write-off.

I vaguely recall having a conversation with you along these lines before and remarking on your distrust of any kind of major car repair. Sometimes that distrust is justified, sometimes it isn’t. Here in Ontario there can be even worse implications – a car that’s been in a serious accident and reclaimed from salvage has to get both a Structural Inspection Certificate and a Safety Standards Certificate from a certified inspection station in order to be licensed. But as always, there’s another side. Getting a new car as a result of a relatively non-serious collision that’s easily repairable has impacts both on your bank account and on the environment. I have to agree with you, though, that auto insurers’ infuriating inclination to require that repairs be made with used or knock-off parts is a huge problem in the whole industry.

13

“Older” is kind of relative…reading the subject line I have to say I wasn’t expecting an ‘07 anything to be considered older, but I guess it really is.

FWIW at some point—and maybe not for all makes and models—older metamorphosizes into collectible. What happens if an older car like my family’s 1974 Volkswagen Campmobile gets in an accident is that our insurer pays us the mutually-agreed value, if it’s considered totaled. We also get to keep it.

14

Luckily she is a frugal person who recently got something like 6 months of back increased SS surviving divorced spouse benefits, because that’s how long it took the application to be processed since my dad died (which is an entirely different rant for another day). She has quite a lot of backlogged home repairs that she was trying to figure out in what order to do, but I am guessing the car will come first.

15

I was rear-ended a few years ago. The insurance adjuster typed in my van’s info and said it needed to be totaled. When I looked sad and unconvinced, he turned his screen to show me incontrovertible, computerized proof that my car should be totaled.

Being a nerd, I read the whole screen and said: “It’s not white, it’s grey.”

When he corrected the color, the value went up $20 and it crossed the line to being repaired instead of totaled. He said he’d never seen that happen before.

16

Doesn’t have to be an accident. My car got stolen in Cambridge (towed - they really wanted it) and stripped. That was bad enough for the insurance to declare it totaled. (They found the car, and I saw it.) Which was good, since the car was a real lemon, and I could buy a better car.
A Pinto.

17

Anyone who cared enough to steal a Pinto using a tow truck is obviously a mad genius. I bet the stripped parts went into a custom DeLorean with a flux capacitor.

Either that or they were exceedingly stupid.

Or did you mean you bought a Pinto with the proceeds of the payoff on something even shittier? If so, we could have a fun thread “Guess which car @Voyager had that was so awful that a Pinto was an improvement?” :grin:


Ouch.

My wife died a couple years before I retired. So SSA had plenty of time to get used to the idea she was gone. I started the application to take my survivor’s benefits about 3 months before my (completely predictable) work retirement date to be effective the first month after my retirement date. So far, so normal.

They sent the letter announcing I’d been approved and that my benefit commencement date would be XX/XX/XX about 2 weeks after the first payment arrived right on time. Go figure.

18

Yeah, for my mom it was ridiculous - they made her provide all the documentation regarding their marriage, divorce, etc. The same documentation she had already provided years ago in order to get Railroad Retirement divorced spouse benefits - which are also administered by the Social Security Administration. And she was over 60 and had not remarried at that point, so there was literally nothing in the interim that could have affected her eligibility.

Ah well, at least she’s not going to be broke all the time anymore!

19

That depends - I have a neighbor who kept a 1972 ish car for years. It was a collectible - except for the condition it was in. He kept it so long because he was holding out for the collectible price , which no one was willing to pay for a car they were going to use for parts that didn’t even run. If that car had been totaled, he would have gotten the book value of the car or to keep the car, not both. Because they always deduct the salvage value when you keep the vehicle and in this case salvage value and book value were the same. ( he finally sold it for under $300 - he spent way more than that on registration and insurance for all those years )

20

I got sort of lucky-- I bought a car in '16 new, and paid in full, a Chevy Spark, because it got the best mileage possible. I really wanted an electric car, but I lived in an apartment, and it wasn’t feasible. Had a landlord that wouldn’t possibly believe that a charger in the parking lot, paid for by someone else, might be good for them.

Late last year, had moved to a new place, and for reasons, going through a lot of gas each week.

About six months after moving, got sideswiped in a way that damaged only one body panel and a wheel, but took out a ball joint, so the repair was expensive, but didn’t total out the car.

It happened that I had a neighbor who was a master mechanic, and on the market for a gas-efficient car for his wife. They already had a midsize for the family, and this was mostly for just her, so the fact that it didn’t really have a usable backseat, and the front seat wasn’t comfortable if you were over 5’9 (she’s about 5’2) didn’t matter.

He made me an attractive offer, which, together with the money from the insurance company, a summer bonus I had from work for perfect attendance, and a cash-out on a small whole life policy I no longer needed now that I had a military policy, I had a 20% down payment on a Nissan Leaf.

The new apartment complex rented garages for 1/3 of what I spent on gas in a week, and it had a wall plug for charging.

The savings in gas more than made the monthly payments on the new car.

So just seconding the idea that stuff can work out.

You mom should get a new car-- exactly what she wants.