My car is in salvage title from the previous owner, but everything has been repaired. However, it got into another accident yesterday, rear-ended by another drunk driver, so it wasn't my fault at all.

Today i went to get an estimate for the repair cost of my car, and it turned out ~$4500 to repair for all my damage. But according to the Blue Book, my car is only worth ~$2500.

My question is that what will insurance company do to my car?
what are my options?
and my car already had a salvage title before the accident, so will the insurance still give me money on the approximate value of my car? .

or do you think they will only give me half of the value of my car, or even not giving me any money back at all, just because the vehicle was salvaged before the accident?

thanks!

Yikes. This is the situation you CHOOSE to get yourself in when you got a salvage title- i pray that you paid only 40% of the value of that car.

You dont have options. If the vehicle is worth less then repair cost- they will total it. In your case.. they are.

Now.. your not getting that blue book figure- that is for a vehicle WITHOUT a salvage title. You will get about 40% of that. So.. your looking at about 1250.00. You can either take that amount.. and give them the car... or they can deduct the salvage value of your car from that and you can keep your car and get this money.

Ugh.. ive never understood why people get salvage vehicles.

Hai,

I am Ruktiamo.

Title insurance for used cars

When Drew Mouton first saw the red 1996 Porsche 911 Carrera parked with a for-sale sign along the side of the road two years ago, it looked shiny and new, like "the epitome of what a Porsche is supposed to be."

He purchased the car for about $37,000 after checking out its title history online. But when Mr. Mouton received his ownership title from the state a few months later, it said the Porsche had water damage.

Luckily, before buying the car Mr. Mouton also had bought protection designed to cover situations like his: vehicle title insurance.

Worried of losing money if he ever decided to sell the Porsche, Mr. Mouton contacted his insurer, who took possession of the car and refunded him its full value. "It would have been a fairly significant loss for me if I hadn't just through chance decided to purchase title insurance," says the 34-year-old technology investor from New Orleans.

Insurance like the policy Mr. Mouton purchased has been around for a few years, but it's now increasingly being promoted by car makers, dealers and others as way to reassure and protect buyers of used cars.

The vehicle title insurance, called TitleGuard, offers financial protection if information in a vehicle's title history report turns out to be inaccurate, including information provided by motor-vehicle departments around the country. It also insures against fraud involved in the transfer of the title, or ownership, of the vehicle. And it covers legal expenses if the insurer decides to fight in court any liens that turn up or parties who might claim they own the auto.

Still, while title insurance can protect against heavy losses, consumer experts say it's not necessarily something all used-car buyers need to consider -- especially since inaccuracies and title fraud aren't common.

TitleGuard was created by Vehicle Title Agency LLC, a title agency jointly created four years ago by title insurer First American Corp. of Santa Ana, Calif., and vehicle-history provider Experian Automotive of Schaumburg, Ill. Both Vehicle Title Agency and Experian Automotive, a unit of U.K.-based GUS PLC's Experian, sell TitleGuard directly to consumers.

Vehicle Title Agency says its most common TitleGuard policy costs a one-time fee of $49.95 and provides as much as $50,000 of coverage, since used cars tend to be priced below that amount. Consumers can buy additional coverage up to $500,000, which would run about $671. Buyers are covered until they sell the vehicle or transfer the title. The policy also comes with one vehicle-history report, called AutoCheck, from Experian Automotive.

Experian Automotive's version of TitleGuard runs a bit more, at $59.99 for $50,000 worth of coverage. That includes 60 days' worth of unlimited vehicle-history reports for any other vehicles.

But TitleGuard's creators aren't the only ones pitching the product these days. Some auto makers are giving away the insurance with the purchase of a certified pre-owned vehicle -- mainly in response to lawsuits in recent years alleging that certified pre-owned vehicles had problems like frame damage.

Ferarri SpA's Ferrari North America Inc. unit and Nissan Motor Co. give it to buyers of their certified pre-owned vehicles, including Nissan's Infiniti brand. Ferrari says it hasn't had any claims yet. Experian Automotive says there haven't been any claims for Infiniti but there have been for Nissan, though it can't disclose specifics. (Nissan officials couldn't be reached for comment).

Other companies, meanwhile, are selling the product and taking a percentage of the policy's price. Warrantech Corp.'s Warrantech Automotive, a Bedford, Texas, provider of finance and other products that car dealerships sell to customers, offers the coverage at about 230 dealerships in the U.S. Escrow.com, an Irvine, Calif., service that provides a place where buyers, sellers and lenders can store funds until a transaction is complete, sells TitleGuard online.

And earlier this year, Credit Union Direct Lending, a Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., provider of products to credit unions and car dealers, began selling TitleGuard on its AutoSmart.com site to members of the 570 credit unions it works with.

TitleGuard's coverage kicks in, say, when it turns out that a vehicle had been declared a lemon, had been in a flood or was determined to be salvage -- and such information didn't show up in the AutoCheck report.

Vehicle Title Agency says information in a vehicle-history report could be inaccurate for a number of reasons, including errors by a state's Department of Motor Vehicles; lags between the time a vehicle-history report is issued and the DMV gets salvage or other title information; and errors in creating the vehicle-history report.

Because of such errors, reports could miss fraud like odometer rollbacks and title washing, where people take advantage of differences in how states define terms like "salvage" and "totaled" and retitle a damaged car as clean in certain states.

TitleGuard doesn't cover all inaccuracies, however, including information from car auctions, because such data are difficult to verify, Vehicle Title Agency says.

Titles are generally in the hands of banks issuing auto loans, and a title transfer usually can take as much as eight weeks. So car buyers can't always ask to see a copy of a physical title before going through with a sale.

Auto-shopping experts say that if you're buying a vehicle too old to qualify for a manufacturer's certified pre-owned program, especially one that's 10 or more years old or has more than 50,000 miles on it, you might want to consider vehicle title insurance.

Such autos have likely been through multiple hands and are likely sold by an independent used-car dealer or private party where controls for fraud aren't as strong as at franchise dealers, says Chris Ford, Warrantech Automotive's president. Warrantech includes vehicle title insurance automatically only as part of its service contract designed for cars with 50,000 to 100,000 miles.

Another time to consider TitleGuard is when buying a vehicle that has been moved around between states a lot, comes from a flood area or is from a state hit by last year's hurricanes. According to the National Automobile Dealers Association, about 625,000 vehicles suffered damage in last year's hurricanes, most damaged by water, and about half of them might still be driveable and at risk of being resold.

Consumers also should consider TitleGuard if they are buying a used car from a private party or online seller.

Dean Daniels, a 32-year-old systems administrator in Plainfield, Ill., bought a Toyota Camry Solara a few years ago on online auction site eBay Inc. for about $13,000, after checking out the vehicle's title history online at Experian Automotive.

The seller, an auto broker, shipped him the vehicle, but didn't send the title. Two months later, the seller filed for bankruptcy, and Mr. Daniels decided to protect himself and purchase TitleGuard. Then, one of the company's employees contacted Mr. Daniels claiming that the car was his payment as part of the bankruptcy agreement and that the title, which Mr. Daniels hadn't received yet, proved it. TitleGuard determined that Mr. Daniels was the rightful owner of the vehicle, and ultimately bought the car from him for what he paid (including interest on his auto loan) to shield him from any continuing dispute with the employee.

EBay's auto division says it offers a vehicle purchase-protection program at no charge that protects vehicle buyers against such fraud up to $20,000. Mr. Daniels says that at the time, eBay required that complaints be filed within 35 days, and he missed the cutoff by four days. (In the spring of 2004, eBay changed its policy and extended the time frame to 90 days, because many buyers take two to three weeks to handle financing and arrange shipping of an automobile.)

Despite Mr. Daniels's problem, some consumer experts say inaccurate information in a vehicle-history report and title fraud happen so infrequently that they question whether TitleGuard is something most used-car buyers really need.

Vehicle title insurance is generally "a solution in search of a problem," says Philip Reed, consumer-advice editor at auto-research site Edmunds.com. The insurers "wouldn't be offering this insurance with such a high payback if there was a good chance a claim was going to happen," he says.

While Vehicle Title Agency estimates between 5,000 and 10,000 people sign up for its product a month, the company won't disclose how many claims it has had.

Experian Automotive, meanwhile, would not disclose statistics for how often its vehicle-history reports have errors in them or are lacking information.

But competitor Carfax Inc., a Fairfax, Va., vehicle-history provider owned by R.L. Polk & Co., estimates that one out of every million records it puts into reports needs to be corrected, often because of human error.