Total Loss... Buy back?
 

My car has been declared a total loss after I was rear-ended last week. It's a clean hot lava 2013 with 55k. The insurance company has offered me a fair settlement on it and they have also offered me a fair buyback price. The car has pretty serious rear end damage; the deck lid is ruined, bumper cover, inner bumper, tail lights, both rails bent, trunk pan folded and torn... but it's not completely crushed. It's actually still driveable. To make it worth it to buy the car back, I'd have to get about 2700 for the car minus the engine and transmission or about 4k for the complete car, with the damage. Has anyone tried selling a car with crash damage? Is there any market for a car like that? I don't want to get stuck with a worthless pile and regret not taking the whole settlement.

Well, if it's a fair settlement, I'd take it and move on. Wouldn't be worth the work to part it out IMO.

Not interested in parting out. Either selling it whole or whole other than the engine and transmission which I will keep for spares.

You'd make a decent amount parting it out. All depends on if you can justify buying it for what they're willing to sell it for.

You'll be able to sell it for the sum of all salvageable parts left on it, plus a couple hundred for scrap metal, minus the labor to remove all parts, minus overhead for whoever is selling the parts, minus their profit. The insurance company has already calculated that out and given you that as the buyback price.

If you aren't going to part it out yourself, and the engine/transmission doesn't have some special sauce you can't walk away from, you will be doing extra work trying to get rid of it for no gain.

But if I could sell the whole thing for more than the insurance company wants for it... That would be gain with no labor. But I'm not sure if I can do that. That's what I'm trying to ask about.

If it was worth much more the insurance company would want more for the buy back.
That said if you pulled the engine and transmission they could actually have more value individually than they do in the car. A very quick check shows the asking price for a used engine is around $3k and a tranny is about $500. Just keeping those as spares would put you ahead of the deal. No idea what the rest of the car would be worth in one piece but even if you got $500 for it you would still be way ahead. If you have the ability to pull it apart ( I know you said you didn't want to do the work) and the time and patience to sit on the parts until sold you could make much more.
Don't see an easy flip for any real profit without putting some sweat into it though.
Keep in mind that people have bought fully repairable write offs for as little as $4k and if you try hard enough you could find a clean title high milage one for as little as $10k.

People ask 3k. My research shows that engines usually actually sell for no more than 2k. And I'm not opposed to the labor. I've parted cars out before. What I'm curious about is the value of a crashed fr-s. It's not an abundantly common sale so I don't have much data on which to base an estimate of the cars value with the damage.

Ya that is why I said "asking". Asking prices are easy to get but what things really sold for can be more difficult.
Based on reading a few hundred thousand posts on here there was a day when a badly damaged car would sell for several thousand dollars. Those days are gone now that there are more around. It is impossible to guess what you could get for the whole car. Most insurance write offs are sold at auction so the price received is based completely upon what the highest bidder is willing to pay. This of course can be incredibly variable depending on location, degree/type of damage, reserve bids and many other variables. There are a pile of wrecked ones out there and each one knocks the value down that much more. You can probably search the insurance auction sites to get a good idea of what they are selling for.
If you can get it cheap enough to make the engine and tranny a good back up plan then go for it. If not I personally would not hold up any hope at all in making quick and easy money off it.
Give it a kiss goodbye and move on.

You are probably not going to get what you think you "should" without putting in effort. Move on

Sounds like a headache and a lot of work for MAYBE a buck or two.

+1 not worth it unless someone PM's you who wants the chassis and is willing to pay the ~$3k to you instead of waiting for it to show up in a junkyard.

There is a well oiled machine set up to maximize profit from wrecked cars for everyone involved, trying to beat that machine without an opportunity already lined up is not odds I'd chose. Although this is one of the few cars where a fixable chassis has some value as someone's track/drift toy, if both rails are bent the number of people willing to put effort into fixing that is low.

Like @Tcoat said, the time has passed for that, there are nearly 100k of these things in North America, parts are readily available so buyers go to the best value.

Yeah I guess I'll pass on the buyback.

I'd pass.

Cluttered driveway for god knows how long. Your lost man hours. Dealing with tire kickers and low ballers. Spare parts you may never need. Falling scrap steel prices. Jawas would probably steal everything anyway.