Here's why it makes NO Sense to Buy Salvage Auction Supercars Anymore...

Rebuilding Salvage Supercars looks glamorous and a great way to make a ton of money. But the days of snagging a Cheap Dream car at auction are gone, and these cars are now selling for way more money than it makes sense.

[donmynack]

You don't want to be the guy who restores auction supercars, you want to be the guy who sell parts to the guy who restores auction supercars.

[martinvalencia]

before YouTubers started buying these things up, the prices were much more reasonable. People were paying less than a quarter of some of these cars original worth for cars in better condition than that ferrari.

[neilgunns]

Posting what they sold for makes the video so much better. 👏

[MisterMechanicV]

The reason it makes no sense to buy auction cars anymore, is because of youtubers. They spent all this time lying to people about how much it costs to do, and now all these jabronies are bidding up the price of auction cars to the point that it's more expensive to repair an auction car than just buy a clean title used car.

[Hammerhead]

14:54

Uncle Tony's Garage did a really good video on why rivian trucks are so obscenely expensive to repair after an accident.

Turns out that it's because of the integrated aluminum body panel construction that basically necessitates completely replacing half the vehicle even for something as simple as a minor fender bender.

[davelucas]

The number of times we have heard Sam says he's nearly finished a car, but yet we never get to see the results but yet a new car video.

[vintagebikes]

I do many restorations, most motorcycles. This guy is a superb mechanic. Ability to fix cost effectively is related to diagnostic savvy...notice his ability to use compression testers, wand cameras and diagnostic software. Impressive. The biggest problems I've had are with old machines which sat for 17+ years. Start them without juicing engine (kicking oil through engine) and engine wear begins, then grows. It's micro scratching which simply increases over time.

[TristanDurandBuilds]

As someone who buys crashed bikes and rebuilds them on YouTube, let me confirm something: you lose money when rebuilding (yes, even on bikes).
Regardless if it's a clean title or a salvage title, the resell value will be less than the bike and parts (and of course in the meantime you had to buy more tools and create a paintbooth somewhere). If you do it right you will lose thousands of dollars, if you do it cheap you will lose a few hundreds.
Rebuilding doesn't make financial sense.

The only way I see it becoming a profitable business is by parting out the bikes and sell the parts on eBay.
It's a great business to go in if you enjoy fighting rusted bolts, have an inventory of parts all over your house, take photos of this constant flow of parts to then create eBay listings and package/ship weird shaped things when they sell.

After eBay fees you may have enough to keep going.

But if you like money you might want to find another business idea, just my personal experience

[mrtfisher]

As someone who builds RVs for a living, hail damage can tend to be detrimental to an RV. Roof damages lead to massive leaks and it’s a super expensive repair. We’d charge 4-6k to redo a roof on a unit that size but that also comes with a “warranty”

[MKRN]

I bought my car on Copart in the beginning of 2019. I paid $1750 with fees and transport to the friends shop for it. Nowadays the same car goes for around $4k in a much rougher shape, adding the cost of repair makes no sense to buy this car anymore. And I'm talking older BMW, like 15 years old! Back then for the price I paid for it I had perfectly sorted car, visually and mechanically for the price of used car on the market that more than likely still had some things that needed to be done. I know about this business from when I was little, Copart and IAAI are the ones I knew even before I got here in the US. Nowadays it doesn't make sense financially to buy cars there anymore. If I can pay like a $1k more for a clean title car on the market, I'm not gonna bother doing all the work just so I'm gonna end up with a rebuilt title car that's automatically worth less on the market and it's very hard to sell later. But to be honest, these days fixing car from auction will make you spend more on the car that it's worth on the market.

[BlagoP]

Crashed cars are not worth it anymore in the post covid world. By the time they're fixed (assuming they're even fixed properly), they cost almost as much as a non crashed car with similar year/mileage and will always have a crashed title.

[jackb]

I really like your Copart walk-arounds especially w/Sage. Including RVs is good too.

[anthonywalker]

Definitely enjoy videos like this, always wondered about total costs involved when buying from copart. But i also know that in order for it to sense, one would need the ability to repair these projects basically in house.

[valis]

Copart has a ton of fees. I bought a totaled car as a parts car, my winning bid was $850, final price was around $2, 000. Not only are there a variety of fees, but at least in the one I used in the Tampa Florida area, only a licensed auto transporter can remove the car from the yard (maybe it's different if you have a dealer's license, but I am just a regular person). So you can't even take a trailer and pick it up easily. So granted the $2k included delivering it across the state, but still it was far from the $850 I started with and either way I would have had to pay a transporter to get it out of the auction yard.

[nylonstringninja]

I got an RV at copart and man what a mistake. It was a big trailer, but I found so many hidden problems other than the ones I knew about when I inspected it. Be careful everybody

[tborow]

Goonzquad is a good example of spending way more than it’s worth to rebuild salvage autos.

[chrisgray]

Great video guys thanks. Hail damage on vans normally mean water leaks in the roof.

[molskimauler]

Outstanding that you showed the sold for price.

[ChristopherHelgerson]

what happened to the V12 you sent to VTune to fix the frame? He posted a video showing it was repaired and we never saw it again?... that was over a year ago or so.

[michaelb.]

The buy salvage and fix on YouTube has become so popular it's raised all the prices and ruined the fun of it, like American Pickers did to garage sales. I used to make a living buying and selling musical instruments from and on Craigslist in 2010 or so. It was easy, then everyone started doing it and it's near impossible to make a living now because the deals are so few and far between. Also, Guitar Center used to haggle, now they don't.