I had two old cars that were totaled, neither because of me. One was 15 years old and the other was 20 years old. I got $1100 and $1500, respectively, for the cars. I paid $750 for the first and had driven it for eight years. For the other I paid $1000 and drove it for over seven years.
That may sound like I made out but there was no way to replace those cars with similar ones then. Finding another 1983 Datsun Nissan Sentra Diesel in 1998 and a 1988 Ford Festiva in 2008 wasn’t happening, and any newer car with similar fuel efficiency was going to cost much more.
Our 2nd car is a 2008 Prius with 200K miles on it. It’s been hit in parking lots leaving some damage on a few panels, we certainly don’t bother reporting those anymore. Anything that doesn’t impact the ability to drive it we ignore. We’re driving it until the wheels fall off. Maybe 1-2K miles a year at most.
That was it. The car in question was a Galaxie 500, bought for me by my father without asking me.
The Pinto was better than you might think. It had a good Bosch engine, and nobody tailgated you.
Well, you can dispute the value the insurance company puts on your car. You can also ask for a check, instead of repairs.
But you can argue that.
used car prices have gone up, you can show three for sale listing for the same car with higher asking prices, and the Insurance co has to take that into consideration.
Yes, you can- depending on whose “book” they want to try to use- Kelly Blue book trade in? Bogus.
As you said-
Yeah, a neighbor smashed the tail end of my 2019 sedan, which I bought used at a great price of $10K (very low milage). The damages were somewhat over $9k, which his boss just paid for him (apparently it will come out of him paycheck in installments0. But if we had gone thru Insurance companies they might have argued it was totalled.
Umm, I’m not sure what you mean here. Most Pintos came with the Lima four cylinder. It might have had a Bosch ignition system, but I think that would be aftermarket, as most came with a Duraspark.
Saturn doesn’t exist anymore & there weren’t a ton of 'em produced. It’s very hard to find body specific parts for them (as opposed to a generic GM engine that was also in other vehicles). Finding certain parts for them are like striking gold.
Makes sense, it was just one of those questions I hadn’t expected to be asked. And I didn’t know the answer to it-- I knew the hood was angled funny from running under the Jeep’s bumper (the Jeep appeared fine, and drove away from the scene). And I knew the back bumper was messed up (and how expensive those were to replace, because I’d been rear-ended before). And I knew it wasn’t drivable.