Originally Posted By: ryanschillinger
But book value can't be much. A body shop bill will be very high to repair and repaint all that. If it is considered totaled, I would just buy it back from insurance at the salvage value (probably under $500) and buff it out best I could. Touch up paint here and there, and enjoy my $500 car.
The Geo Metro I had worth $1500 tops cost just around $1500 to repair, and the insurance of the company van that rear ended it, paid it without putting up a fight. They were probably getting sued to high heaven by the pedestrian that my car was pushed into when rear ended, so they were happy to pay $1500 to fix my car and be done with me.
Before you ask: no, I couldn't have taken a $1500 check and kept the car as it was or got another. Initially, the insurance company only wanted to pay $450 for the bumper itself. It had more damage than that, but that's all their adjuster sighted as needing replacement. I had to take it to a body shop for estimated repair costs before the insurance company would actually pay what it would cost to fix it. I was expecting a call from the body shop saying the insurance company preferred to total it out, but amazingly they didn't.
Back in Arkansas, I had two different early 90s cars that were technically "totaled" (the two red ones pictured above) by insurance companies in accidents but they never bothered to label the titles as such since they just paid me for the value of the cars and I kept the cars. There was never any transfer of title to the insurance company then back to me, warranting a salvage title, so they kept "clear" titles. One eventually went to a dealer as a trade in (probably went directly to savage anyway) and the other I sold directly to a salvage yard myself later on after the engine went bad.
