front end damage on 4th gen?

[pudbrother]

i might have the chance to pickup a 4th gen camry with front end damage. im not sure the year. but im assuming evertything up front including the hood need replacing. so lets say worst case scenerio, bumper, all the lights, hood, grille, radiator, and anything else you may think of. could some one give me an idea of how much this would cost to fix. i think she said it has about 150k on it, full leather interior, sunrood and i believe its an xle. im trying to figure out how much it will cost to repair, and about how much i should pay for it.

[mspringer]

$0?
I wouldn't pay much more than that, unless you want to do all the work yourself with junkyard parts, you will spend way more than its worth, and still have 150k miles on it.

I have a 97, 4cyl, auto, cloth int, with a sunroof that I bought in nice shape (never wrecked)from a little old lady, with 86k miles on it and the timing belts and waterpump already done - price? $2500. You will spend that much repairing the front end damage on the wrecked car, and depending on whether there was an insurance claim on it, you may get a "blue title" (salvage title) as well, which would make the car next to worthless.

You will be way better off if you keep looking for a complete, low mile car. Trust me.

[toyomoho]

How about the frame? As mspringer states, if a shop does the work your better off buying a car in good condition.

[shingouki808]

I'm not sure about where you're from, but most states won't give a salvage title to a car unless there's frame damage or heavy body damage to spots that can't be easily replaced. (ie. rear quarter panel, roof, pillars, trunk area) As long as the car wasn't on fire or submerged fully in water, you could still fix it. But............ from what you described, in parts alone, you're looking at about $800 - $1200. Add in about 12 hours worth of labor and you're probably gonna pay just slitghtly less then what it would take to buy a similar car in decent condition like stated above. Unless you can do all the work yourself and you live really close to a large scale junkyard, it's not worth the bother. Watch the insurance thing too. With that damage they'll just pay you out half the blue book and call it a day.

[mspringer]

Originally Posted by shingouki808

I'm not sure about where you're from, but most states won't give a salvage title to a car unless there's frame damage or heavy body damage to spots that can't be easily replaced. (ie. rear quarter panel, roof, pillars, trunk area) As long as the car wasn't on fire or submerged fully in water, you could still fix it.

This portion of your reply is completely wrong, and you can thank car hating liberals for that.

States do not make a determination of whether a car is salvaged or not, its typically the insurance company. (States simply do not have the capacity to inspect and make determinations on what is or isnt "totaled". States empower insurance companes to do that for them.) States do have laws that vary, but states laws focus more on filing, whether you can fix them, whether a salvage title can ever be "restored", etc., and how they treat salvage titles from other states.

What happens is that if an insurance company determines that the damage to a vehicle is more than 2/3 of the blue book value, then they call it "totaled" and pay the insured (hopefully) blue book on the car (of course, they try to screw you over, first...)
The insurance company will then "own" the car, and register the title as "salvaged" and send the car to auction.

I have DEFINITELY seen many cars with light front end damage that were totaled by insurance companies - this used to happen all the time to Camaro/Firebirds because the front ends were complicated (lots of parts) and very expensive. It was not uncommon to total one of those cars with a minor front end collision, which did not deploy the airbags. That is (one reason) why insurance for those cars was so high at the time. (A Corvette was actually often cheaper to insure.) And until more recently (since prices of airbags have fallen), if you had a front end collision that deployed the airbags, you could forget that car, it was totaled. That is not as true now, except on older cars, as the airbags can add as much as $1000 to the cost to repair, so a car with a low blue book can more easily be considered totaled. (That is also why you see a lot of salvage title vehicles for sale without airbags in them.)

Anyway, as a car gets older, or depreciates rapidly, then it gets easier to total it. if the car is only worth $3000, then $2000 in damage will total it. Also, a good rule of thumb on paint and body is to double the parts cost and that is a rough estimate of the total bill with all the paint work and parts swapping, so if you estimate $1200 in parts, the overall bill will be $2400, and the car is "totaled" (given a value of around $3000).

The reason I blamed the liberals (somewhat jokingly, but only somewhat...) is that the current system (described above) was put in place to get older cars off the road. It is rooted in a quest for cleaner emissions. the poor guy who gets his old car totaled has to go out and buy a nice new car which puts out far fewer emissions (allegedly) than his "beat up old clunker" (LOL!).
If you are a conspiracy theorist, you also might think that the car companies are behind said policies, as a way to force people to buy new cars...

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Also, for some odd reason that I haven't figured out, Camry's do not seem to hold their value once they are over 5-7 years old, or so, and mileage didn't seem to matter a lot. Blue book on my 97 was $2800 - $3000 and that was over a year ago, when the car was 8 years old. The poor woman I bought it from paid slightly over $20,000 for the car. (I have the original window sticker, bill of sale, and a record of every dime she spent on the car... LOL!)