How the number is worked out
The front page is the short version. This is every line behind it, the three ways to build the same car, and the things we will not do.
Everything that goes into the number
People lose money on salvage cars in the gap between what they expected to spend and what they actually spent. These are the lines that live in that gap, and they are all in the ledger.
Body damage comes out of the photos, line by line, with where it sits on the car and how bad. Mechanical trouble comes out of what the seller wrote, because no photograph shows a slipping transmission. “Needs a motor” becomes a short block, a long block or a used engine with install hours against each. Then the part nobody else gives you: what neither the photos nor the description rule out, each with a likelihood and what it costs if it turns out to be real.
On a private sale: sales tax, title, plates, the fluids and filters anything sitting for months will need, and the brakes and tires the photos quietly show. On an auction lot, all of that plus the auction fees, the broker’s fee you pay without a dealer license, transport from the yard, and the rebuilt inspection your state requires. Either way it is usually four figures, and it is what turns a good deal into a bad one.
Structural damage to a frame rail, apron, rocker or pillar. Deployed airbags on a car worth less than the SRS bill once it is finished. A flood title or a burn code. A state that will not issue a rebuilt title for that car at all. Any one of those is a walk, whatever the arithmetic said a line earlier.
No resale figure means no maximum price, and it says so instead of guessing one. A flood or burn stop is read from the auction’s coded fields only, never from the seller’s prose, so somebody writing "no fire damage" can never trigger one by accident.
Three builds, when there are prices to choose between
Budget, which is the cheapest that still arrives in time. Balanced, on US parts. And all OEM. Each gets its own total, its own longest wait, its own maximum price and its own verdict.
Not live yet, and the table below is an illustration. Choosing between a $104 bumper and a $412 one needs somebody quoting both, and we have not connected a parts supplier yet. Until we do, a part nobody has quoted is costed at a typical price - the same one in all three builds - so the three come out close together or identical. The engine does the rest of the work already; it is the prices that are missing, and we would rather say so here than show you three numbers that are really one.
A part nobody has quoted gets a typical price and a label saying so. Counting it as free would inflate your ceiling at exactly the moment the estimate knows least.
Your price is filed against that year, make and model, and kept. Your re-run uses it, and so does the next car like it that you look at.
Labour, split the way it really happens
Book hours are written for a trained panel beater with the right tools and the part already on the shelf. You are not that, at least not on your first car, so your hours are the book hours multiplied for a real beginner's pace, and the screen tells you why rather than hiding a number in it.
Every job is rated easy, moderate, hard or shop-only. Shop-only work is priced rather than quietly dropped: airbags, ADAS calibration, frame, air conditioning, each with the reason it is beyond a home garage. Paint goes to a shop by default, because almost nobody sprays their own metallic, and you can turn that off and take the hours and materials back. Your hours stay hours, not dollars, unless you choose to put a price on your own time.
Change anything, free, forever
Fix the mileage, the price, the title or its state, or what you know a clean one really sells for. Re-runs reuse the photo read, so there is no second read, no quota and no charge.
“You changed the mileage to 112,000 miles, and the most to pay went down $1,500.”
Every re-run says what you changed and what it did to the number. What you type always beats what the model read, and a correction is never overruled.
Then it learns your pace
Log what you paid, what the parts really cost, your hours, each surprise and what it cost, the sale price and how long it took to sell.
Every estimate is scored against what actually happened, keeping the direction of the error, because an estimate that ran low is the one that costs you money. After three logged cars the beginner's multiplier becomes yours, measured, and the screens stop calling it a beginner's.
Parts prices are never quietly scaled behind your back. A gap that keeps showing up gets reported to you instead. And at the end of it, one number almost nobody calculates: what an hour of your weekends actually came to.
Finding the cars in the first place
It never searches the auction for you, and never opens a listing page on your behalf. It works from the lots it has already seen, and from the page you opened yourself.
Upcoming auction cars with a rough ceiling already on your numbers. Filter by make, model, price, yard, sale date, and whether the public can bid without a licence. Dealer-only lots are shown rather than hidden, with the broker’s fee already inside the figure and a line saying you cannot bid on it yourself.
Pick a make, model, years and a ceiling. Every match gets called in one word - worth a look, close, walk, needs a value, no bid yet - with the reason. New matches arrive in a morning email, with a reminder the day before the sale.
On a Copart lot page it answers in a side panel using the page’s own data, so there are no extra requests and no listing read at all. It can scan a search page to bring lots into your list. It never bids, and it never touches anything behind member, account, payment or login.
Seven rules we do not break
A tool that tells you what to pay is worth nothing unless it has no reason to lie to you. These are the ones that cost us something to keep.
The plain-words summary is only allowed to restate figures the ledger already gave it. It can never introduce one of its own.
Correct the mileage, the title or a part price and nothing overrules you, on that run or any run after it.
The auction fee chart, tariff rates, state title and tax costs, the broker fee. All of them are labelled as unverified until they are checked.
Every unquoted part carries an allowance, because a zero would raise your ceiling precisely where the estimate is weakest.
No auto-bidding, no help on a live auction screen, and no crawling the auction on your behalf. You open the page, we answer about it.
Price, fit and arrival time decide the order. The cheapest option is always shown and always selectable. And we will not help anyone hide a rebuilt title.
There is no error band on this page, because the back-test does not yet have enough real auction sale prices behind it to produce an honest one. The day it does, the number goes here, whatever it says. Until then every single estimate carries its own confidence rating and tells you exactly what it could not see.
Run the car you are looking at now.
Analyze a car free3 cars a month, free. No card, no dealer licence.