[Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the May 2015 issue of Grassroots Motorsports.]
Broken cars whisper to me. I’ve owned some 60-odd cars in my life, and fully half of them did not run when I bought them. Of course, most of them were European sports cars from the ’60s and ’70s, so they had died of …
First, A Word About Insurance
Relax, I’m not going to get all Marlin Perkins on you, but if you want to play this game, you need to understand the rules. Insurance companies will total a car when the repair costs exceed 50 to 60 percent of the current value of that car. According to my experience, that pre-accident value gets rated near the Kelley Blue Book “very good” value by the adjuster. When the cost to repair it reaches a pre-determined percentage of this value, the car is totaled and sold for salvage.
This means that the higher a car’s pre-accident value, the more work you are signing up for to repair it. Put another way, it takes a whole lot more damage to total a 2010 model car than a 2000 model, or a more expensive brand instead of a less expensive one. So if you really want to rebuild that wrecked five-year-old Porsche, realize that the repair bill needs to have been estimated at tens of thousands of dollars.
Photography Credit: Norman Garrett
Contrast this against what it takes to total a 1999 Miata. If the car is worth just $3000, then a mere $1200 worth of damage will deem it as totaled.
Let’s talk about “acceptable levels of damage” from a practical standpoint. That $1200 in damage to the Miata could represent one air bag and a front bumper cover, or it could be a smashed-in door panel. The average reader of GRM could handle these repairs fairly easily.
My absolute favorite is when one or both air bags are set off by a borderline front-end crash, but the front bumper appears undamaged. This is a pretty typical failure, as an 8 mph impact into a stopped car will often trigger the airbags.
Now, air bags are very expensive for a shop to fix–think “liability” and “lawyers” and “all new parts” and you’ll get it. However, at least in my home state of North Carolina, you don’t need to have working air bags to register or operate your own car–my kind of place. (This is not true in all states, so check your local requirements before you get ahead of yourself.) Of course, if…
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