On May 3, my wife was hit by a semi truck while driving to work.
What happened is simple. She was driving in the third lane of a four-lane one-way road, approaching some roadworks in lanes one and two. The truck driver, travelling in the second lane, moved into the third lane and “did not see” — a statement as unbelievable as it is redundant — the Golf with my wife inside. She noticed what was happening in her mirror and accelerated to try and create more space behind, but a collision could not be avoided. The truck driver hit the Golf on the driver’s side above the rear wheel, spinning the car into the truck’s path, then pushed it from the side until he stopped.
This was the photo my wife sent me after the crash. The most important outcome is that she was able to walk away unscathed. It was a slow impact, so the truck driver was able to drive away. But our Volkswagen Golf was damaged enough to be written off.
After it was towed to a body shop and the assessment was completed, our insurance company declared it a total loss and paid out $19,600 based on the price of comparable cars in our area. This is the point at which I learned auto insurance companies do not write off a car because it costs more to fix than to simply pay someone out. They do so after factoring in salvage value and room for error on the repair estimate.
As we got paid, I found our ruined Golf on a salvage auction website with a damage estimate of $12,986.17. Factoring in the amount the insurance company paid us, it needed to sell for at least $6,614 for them to come out ahead. I am not sure it did. While the final auction sale price was not made public — I am not sure why — the highest bid I saw was $2,400.
Some people get excited for a write-off because it means they can go shopping. My wife and I dreaded it. We liked our Golf, but Volkswagen no longer imports the regular model to Canada — we only get the GTI and the Golf R, both of which are much more expensive. (Also, the eighth-generation Golf is not quite as nice as the one we had.) We wanted to keep our relatively small, relatively inexpensive hatchback. But auto manufacturers have spent the seven years since we bought our Golf shifting their inventory to SUVs and making everything more expensive.
We would have much preferred if the car could be repaired. Unfortunately, that would have required the insurance company to pay for that before knowing if it was truly repairable, taking on the risk of perhaps finding significant structural damage or similar. Perhaps it would have been unwise to drive the car after it has been in that crash, even with a successful repair. It is hard to know, and the incentives are not aligned with allowing us to find out. Regardless, it seems more likely to me that any insurance company — not just ours — would decide the likelihood of attempting a repair by prioritizing cost.
This is not too dissimilar to the right-to-repair movement in tech circles. Jason Koebler, of 404 Media, reported on Apple’s steep iPad parts pricing earlier this year:
Jonathan Strange, the founder of XiRepair, put together a spreadsheet of all the new parts and found that more than a third of the iPad parts Apple is now selling are not being sold at a price that is economically viable for independent repair shops. The way he calculated this was by taking the price of the part, adding in $85 for labor and a 10 percent profit margin for a repair shop. If the total repair cost was more than half the price of buying a totally new device, he considers it to be not economically viable.
Even if you do it yourself, parts are very expensive. A brand new 11-inch iPad Pro costs $1,400 in Canada. If you shatter its display, the Self-Service Repair Store bill will come to $945 plus tax for the display, adhesive, and tool kit rental. That is less than a full replacement, especially if you do not have a base model, but it is close enough to the cost of a new iPad to make it an appealing choice.
Fixing things should be the first choice over replacing them, and repairs should be made as inviting as possible. I do not want to think about replacing the battery on my MacBook Pro but, when it is inevitably exhausted, I wish the process were as simple as removing some screws and as inexpensive as battery replacements once were. I do not want my things to be repairable in theory; I would like them to be repairable as a priority.
That is what this article was supposed to be about. But I kept an eye on the used car market in Calgary because, after all, the old Golf was sold at auction, not destroyed. And, a few months later, it showed up for sale at a used car lot here.
Or, well, almost. The one I found has matching specs, a near-identical odometer reading, the same nick in the leather at the bottom of the steering wheel, and the same smudge on the rear passenger-side door where we poorly covered a ding in the door with a paint pen. But its VIN is listed as 3VWG17AU7JM281867, while our Golf’s VIN was 3VWG17AU6JM281867.
It turns out that single different number is the check digit. Entering our Golf’s VIN into the NHTSA decoder validates. The one from the dealership? Nope.
Ultimately, the dealership listed the car for just shy of $17,000. I hope whomever bought was made aware of its real history, and that repairs are satisfactory. The best case is that a not particularly old car gets to keep working for years to come. If incentives were aligned with repairability, however, that car would still be ours, and we would know its provenance and how it was fixed.