Many people call the junkers to tow and “recycle” their old cars despite only having a dead battery, some unknown issue, just old or being even being totally fine. While it seems convenient, recycling cars is still incredibly taxing on the environment and there are plenty of people- some low income, who would absolutely buy your car for the $300, even if it’s broken.
Anecdotally, when I was growing up my single mom pretty much exclusively drove cars that were destined to be crushed. She’d buy em cheap, figure out the issue and try to fix it. One time the car was seriously toast, so she called the scrappers to come take it, making her money back.
I understand that it’s a bit of extra time to list an ad and spend an hour or so transferring papers, but it really is worth it.
So help someone out and help save the planet! Win win!
EDIT: I live in a place where cars have to be inspected to be deemed safe and roadworthy, and I realize that’s not the case everywhere. And I agree with some of you offering situations where scrapping is the best solution.
My LPT is mainly trying to encourage those who have a car in a recently working state to try and sell or giveaway for nothing so it can actually be fixed or used for parts.
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Here where I’m at you can’t sell a car to a person that can’t pass minimum checks. You can only sell to a dealer or recycler if you won’t fix it.
If youre scraping a car because the battery died you dont deserve to be buying another one
If I’m selling it for scrap, it’s because it’s not safe to drive in its current state and/or needs more work on it than it’s worth.
I’m not going to sell that car to someone – no matter how willing – because they can’t afford anything else. Either they’re buying it to scrap it too (in which case I could just get more money doing that myself), they’re buying it to repair it, which they wouldn’t be if they had any sense, and possibly sell it on to some other poor sod, or they’re buying it to drive it as it is.
And I’m not going to support that last one, no matter how desperate they are. And if I haven’t paid to repair it myself, and they’re paying a pittance for it, it means that quite likely they intend to bodge a repair and sell it on, and that’s pretty much the same thing.
If a car is of value, I’d sell it with all the full certs to say its legal to drive.
If it doesn’t have those certs, and it’s not legal to drive, and someone’s selling it… it’s pretty much scrap. If it wasn’t they’d pay for those repairs first and sell it as legal to drive.
If it’s scrap, I’m not going to let someone take it away intending to drive it. That just makes it a deathtrap.
I bought junkers for over a decade, when I had no money. I would pay pittances for them, and when they died or were no longer safe or legal, I’d send them straight to scrap and buy another. It was actually the CHEAPEST way to own a car. My dad was a motor mechanic all his working life, and that means I never bought anything dodgy and I had the CHEAPEST way to repair anything available to me… and I can tell you that he wouldn’t let me drive anything unsafe(*).
But I never, not once, bought a car that didn’t have legit paperwork. If a car can’t pass the necessary tests… it’s for a reason. And if the owner hasn’t paid for the repairs before selling it, there’s a reason for that too. Either the repair is too expensive and worth more than the car, or they know that the repairs can’t make it legal that easily. Either way, you steer clear.
Cars without the paperwork are for scrappers – to break them down and sell the individual parts. Not for repairers. Nobody I’ve ever seen makes a business buying up scrappers and repairing them back to legal and selling them on. They either break them down, or they are literally selling them on with fake paperwork to say they’re legit. I’m not going to support that.
So, sorry, but no. If I’m “sending my old car to the scrappers”, that’s where it’s going. The only other option there is if someone wants to pay for it because they have the same car and they want to swap parts, and they really know what they’re doing. Those kinds of people are obvious. And they’re not going to pay much more than scrap.
I wouldn’t sell such a car off “cheap” to anyone who wasn’t in the motor trade and even then – there are a lot of dodgy characters there who will mark it up tenfold and sell it off with dodgy paperwork to an unsuspecting driver, and I won’t have that on my conscience.
I want to see a declaration that it’s going to be scrapped or broken down (which in the UK is a different bit of the transfer form to when they are buying the car to sell on… once they have filled in the section for scrapping, that car can’t come back onto the road).
I’ve worked with, around, and seen enough dodgy cars and dodgy “mechanics” to never want to work any other way.
(*) True story. We bought a Fiat Panda. We drove it straight to his house. He looked it over. He absolutely condemned the braking on it. He went out and immediately got the full replacement and changed most of the braking system with stock factory parts. He then took it out on the test drive. The braking was ENTIRELY UNCHANGED. It wasn’t that the car’s braking had failed. It’s that it was DESIGNED THAT WAY. He hated it. It was how it was intended to be, it was within legal limits, it passed all the tests, but he hated it so badly because it just wasn’t well designed. He would forever after joke that every Fiat Panda must have a steering wheel with an indentation on the bottom… from where the driver gripped the wheel for dear life and pulled back on it to put as much leverage on the brake as possible whenever they wanted to brake. He was so glad when we got rid of that car.
Definitely worth it, even if your car is written off – my car was just T boned and the local wrecking yard will only give $100 at most even when there are heaps of good parts on it for someone to use or part out themselves. No doubt the wrecking yard would make hundreds to well over a thousand dollars from people pulling the parts they need off it.
I have scrapped a couple of cars because I just didn’t want to deal with prospective purchasers who are in that market segment. Having someone point out all the issues I already knew it had to try and knock a few bucks off the price is just not my bag. Better to get fewer bucks from the scrapper and just have it gone with no fuss.
I scrapped my car instead of having to deal with cheap car people from marketplace
Aren’t there services to make resales easier and virtually paper free? I just sold my 8 year old Hyundai and got more than 40% of its original purchase price for it. This might be a cultural thing but scrapping cars without trying to sell is wild to me.
Scrapping cars because of dead battery or most other minor to medium faults is unthinkable in this day and age of at-home service.
Y’alls scrappers are cheapskates. I’ve scrapped a handful of cars and always got $500 for them as long as I’ve got the title.
And yeah, they were legitimate junk.
I support this 100%. Cash for clunkers ruined the car game for a lot of young car enthusiasts. On top of that, all the newer cars are harder to fix at home over the weekend, forcing people to overpay at dealerships and mechanics.
If you have time to waste go for it. I have a dumbass friend who thought his piece of crap Hyundai was worth way more than it was. He turned down $1,200. He never got another offer. He ended up giving it away months later. He also thinks his 20 year old piece of crap truck is worth way more than it is. I pulled up the blue book prices which are way less than he thinks and showed him. He’s convinced they are wrong.
Transmission in my car died, was gonna be more to fix it than the BB value. Found some online site(pebbles maybe idr) and got paid $2k instead of the $300 a scrapped would have offered me. Was worth the 15 minutes of effort for sure.
It’s not even worth the time anymore. I posted an old junk car I had on FB and a few other places. I was inundated with THOUSANDS of fake messages from people wanting to buy it. After a couple weeks of convincing fakes I just scrapped it.
I run my cars into the ground. I send my old cars to the scrapper, because by the time I’m done with them, the structural integrity has been compromised due to excessive amounts of rust, deeming the car nolonger safe to drive, as it will not pass a safety inspection and the cost of repairs is more than the value of the car.
Way back in the day my girlfriend’s car died. The transmission was shot. I called the junk yard, and their offer was to come pick it up for $100. Like, I would pay them $100 to take it. They said that the recycled metal market had collapsed. I listed it on Craig’s List for $200, noting everything that was wrong with it. It sold in just a few hours. The guy buying it said he could get a new transmission from a junk yard and install it himself. He wanted it for his son to drive to school.
When you get ghosted or flaked on by enough people who “want” to buy your cheap beater car, you give up and sell to the scrappers. At least they show up at the agreed time.
I was trying to sell my old Expedition on marketplace. $800, I wasn’t interested in dumping any more money into it. It was parked at my dad’s place, a mile or so from where I lived. I’d get someone interested in the car, say I’d meet them at the address at a specific time, walk over there, and they’d no show. Or say they had to do a different time than originally agreed on (usually when I was at work). This happened more than once. So I got fed up and sold the damn thing to the scrappers for $500.
Counterpoint. Selling a cheap used car opens you up to all kinds of time wasters, fraud, and scammers.
It can definitely be worth the effort. I sold my old car for 1700$ instead of getting 300 from the scrappers. Took a bit of work, but I was happy to get that much more for it
This is peak American wasteful mentality.
This is one of the reasons we are where we are. Reuse, reduce, Recycle, people. It’s not that hard.
I don’t know which country you are in, but a scrap car here is typically worth a few hundred dollars and even odds whether parts get stripped. On a personal level, it’s definitely more worthwhile to scrap a car than to give it away.
You don’t want to deal with orcs from Mordor. Absolutely no no, bad LPT.
A junk car is minimum $400-500 here even for a small car. I junked one a couple years ago. I think the prices of scrap metal are up. Also they strip the good parts from the car and resell them, so there is value in that.
You won’t get much more on FB marketplace for it and it won’t be worth your effort. Then you have the risk of someone coming back at you if the car is not exactly as they expected.
It really depends on what is wrong with the car though. I haven’t ever junked a car unless it literally did not move or the rust and structural integrity of it was completely compromised or it had something wrong with it that required several thousand dollars of repairs.
Agreed.
I had a Hyundai Accent that was on it’s last leg. I could scrap it, with pick up, for like 300 bucks. I then threw it on craigslist just to see asking a for 1000 bucks. Ended up selling it for 600.
Took a little more time and effort but well worth the extra 300.
This is a double edged sword. It would be nice to do something for people in need. However, a car ready for scrap is usually something that will cost the buyer a lot of money, not something they can actually use.
Case in point, I once had a Land Rover discovery, that I had tried unsuccessfully to get running reliably. I had completely rebuilt the motor, new radiator, new ac pump, etc. etc. It was not having it. The car would not make it out of town without breaking down. The final straw was the brakes would no longer work, something in the ABS was locked so they would not provide any stopping force.
The body was in near perfect condition, as was the interior. I listed in on Craigslist, with a very clear disclaimer that it could only be picked up by a trailer. I had many people wanting it as their first car, because it was one of the cheapest available. When I asked about their ability to fix things, they all said they didn’t have the skills or cash to fix it, so I didn’t sell it. The craziest example was a guy who wanted it now, he was leaving in the morning to drive to Alaska and needed a 4×4. He cussed me out for not selling it to him.
These people weren’t idiots, they were just irrational because they needed a car and couldn’t see what was coming along with it.
I had this same logic with a 2000 Cavalier my girlfriend’s family wanted to get rid of a few years back. It was a pile of shit with charging issues even after replacing way more than it was worth in parts, and they eventually wanted to scrap it. I argued to let me sell the car for them since I figured it was probably an easy enough fix for an otherwise fine running car and I felt bad about it.
The slog of cheap fucks who wanted to negotiate a $250 car down to $50 made me never want to sell anything less than a grand on Facebook anymore. I would rather scrap a car for nothing than have to deal with people like that again.
I knew a guy back in the day who was a heavy-duty shadetree mechanic. A friend of his offered him a junked ’86 Buick Whatever for free, the body & interior were decent but the drivetrain was completely shot. He dragged it home. The next weekend a different friend offered him a junked ’86 Buick Whatever for free, the engine & transmission were solid but the body & interior were completely smoked. He dragged that home, swapped the drivetrains, had a perfectly driveable car for free and sold the remaining pile of trash to a junkyard for $100.
Also look up if you have a “retirement” program. In California if it fails smog you get paid to retire the car, it’s more than scrap value for sure.
Bought a beater that had “a bad head gasket” for $200. A $25 coil later I had a running car.
I have so many stories like that from myself and my dad. It’s one of the reasons for my passion for restoring old, classic cars. I love taking what most would consider an old, worthless POS and turning it into something that runs and drives better than some cars decades newer.
Currently driving a 68 Chevy I inherited from my uncle and rebuilt from the ground up turning it from an old beat up plow truck to something that turns heads every time I take it out (While I’ve spent “more than it’s worth” to most people: It’s worth more on paper than what I’ve spent. Plus it’s my tribute to a man I respected and miss. It will be passed down to the next generation when I die; but not before.)
If you sell it for scrap to a yard take the cats off and sell them separately you will get as much as the car for them but if not they pocket the cash.