New Car Storm Damage-Port Newark,NJ

[aroundqube]

Associated Press news reports are starting to trickle in that 15,000 to 16,000 new cars in Port Newark,NJ awaiting delivery to car dealers were not saleable do to recent storm damage. Fisker Automotive lost 320 of its $103,000 Karma plug in hybrids due to fire caused by salt water. I wonder if there will be any other electric car batteries that made it through the storm that can be had, when the cars are scrapped.

 

[TylerDurden]

Very unlikely. Unsold, damaged new cars are crushed. Tires and engines are sometimes returned to the factory.

 

[dnmun]

i wanted to bid on some of the leafs that got damaged on the dock at sendai from the tsunami. but never got it together to figure out how to do a deal. someone should look into making an offer for the salvage rights. i assume fiskar knows more than anyone about their condition so it could be tough to negotiate but that would be something that the auto salvage guys will be looking at. there are gonna be a lot of totalled cars for salvage guys to bid on too. more than a few will be hybrids too and may be worth investigating.

most states prevent private individuals from bidding on cars at salvage auctions, but you can check your state by contacting the guys who do the most business in insurance recovery, coparts.com. i can't pick up stuff on the other side, but for you guys on the right, it might be worth the effort to buy a recovered hybrid. most cars float now so it may be undamaged inside and just extensive washing and relube might give a useful return on your investment.

 

[liveforphysics]

This reminds me of a time when a massively long freight train wrecked carrying many many hundreds of Honda/Acura TSX-S and RSX-S. It practically spurred a whole generation of engine swaps for older civics into Honda K-series from legit non-stolen sources. Massive wind-fall to the DIY honda hot-rodding community, I ended up owning two different brand-new engines from that train-wreck over the next few years afterward.

The entire shipment was declared a write-off by insurance, who then liquidated it to recover some of there expenses in the loss.
They got bought by auto-dismantlers on a 1 by 1 basis in an auction that took a week or two of straight showing pictures from all sides of the car and starting the bidding. Some where so crushed they sold just for scrap metal value, others were in mildly damaged condition and sold for >$10K to folks that would replace a few body parts and sell it as a rebuilt nearly-new car. The best deals were the ones with smashed back-ends that had undamaged engine compartments that sold for like $1k.

I hope something like that happens for all the Fiskars and LEAFs and Volts etc! That would be so awesome to get a flood of OEM quality motors and controllers and batteries and stuff flooding the DIY EV market for cheap!

 

[Hillhater]

.... most cars float now so it may be undamaged inside and just extensive washing and relube might give a useful return on your investment.

Floating is usually assisted by lightweight new cars having near empty gas tanks.
..and they seldom float for more than half an hour.
An EV woudnt have that flotation aid and will have an extra 100kg of batteries too !